What is so good about the gospel? Have you ever asked yourself that question? What's the biggest and best thing God promises us? What is it exactly that makes it such good news?

In a sermon last week in Houston, Piper unwrapped “The Sweetest Good of the Good News”. And it's something bigger and better than forgiveness, freedom, or an eternity of your favorite hobby — shopping, golfing, or watching movies. Yes, even bigger and better than Houston, San Antonio, and Big D. The greatest good of the gospel is God himself.

It was one of several new messages from Piper over the last week. Below is the buffet of conference talks and sermons from recent trips to Idaho and Texas. You will find something for the Northerner and Southerner alike, for the proud potato harvester, the rough longhorn wrangler, and everyone in between.

“Is Jesus an Egomaniac?”

How can God truly love us when he demands that we worship him? Does his desire for his own glory deny his devotion to us? As only he can, Pastor John shows us again that our greatest satisfaction will only ever be found in his glory.

“Why Is the Glory of God at Stake in Making People Plural?”

If the word 'peoples,' sound like a typo to you, you really need to hear this missions message. Piper draws out the implications of this one little word and shows how the Bible shapes the Great Commission with its language. The task is clear and unfinished, and we need to engage the places — the peoples — yet unreached with the gospel.

“A Spectacular and Scary Promise”

Paul promises in Romans 8 that those who are God's children are also his heirs — heirs of an eternal glory that will eventually be revealed to us. It is a promise so spectacular we can’t even imagine how good it is. But this promise comes to us through suffering — really, really scary pain, disease, conflict, failure, etc.. Amazingly, when we finally receive our inheritance, all our suffering will look as nothing by comparison.

“Saying Well As a Way of Seeing Wonder”

Reflecting on the life and poetry of George Herbert, Pastor John pled with pastors to write. He argues that the act of finding words to describe the worth of Christ is a way of seeing further and deeper into who he is.

It’s no accident that October 31 is both Halloween and the day remembered for the start of the Reformation. Both key off November 1, All Saints’ Day — or All Hallows’ Day (Hallows from the Latin for saints or holy ones).

On All Hallows’ Eve, October 31, 1517, the Roman Church received the world’s most memorable trick-or-treater at its door — though barely noticed at the time — when a lowly priest named Martin Luther approached the threshold of the Wittenberg branch in Germany and posted his 95 measly theses (they aren’t nearly as impressive as you would expect). The coming All Saints’ Day seemed like an excuse for sparring about the Church’s deplorable sanctioning of indulgences, and Luther was angling for some good-spirited debate.

The Spark That Set the Church Ablaze

But the Church was centuries overdue for major reform, the kindling was in place, and Luther’s little, almost accidental spark set the whole thing ablaze. Some nameless visionary translated his theses from the Church’s Latin into the people’s German and sent them far and wide through the printing press. In time, this lowly monk proved to have what it took to hold his ground against the Church and the world — “Here I stand,” he said courageously before the emperor — and under God, he became the human tip of the spear for massive reform.

Of course, that’s the reductionistic version of the story. Save his own Son, God doesn’t change the world through a single person, but through people. With and behind every remembered individual is some great collective. Luther had a significant supporting cast in his Wittenberg work, and on the grander scale, it took many others — like Ulrich Zwingli, John Calvin, Martin Bucer, Thomas Cranmer, John Knox, and many more, all with their associates and assistants — to usher in reform far and wide. God gave Luther the bullhead to do the pioneering. He was the battering ram. But five centuries of Protestant Christianity wouldn’t have followed in the wake of Luther alone.

Enter the French Humanist

In particular, Calvin’s thinking, writing, and systematizing played a complementary role to Luther’s pioneering flair. Born in 1509 in France, Calvin was only eight years old when Luther played his Halloween trick in 1517.

Calvin was trained as a humanist and converted sometime between 1528 and 1532, while at university, and by All Saints’ Day, 1533, he had himself in hot water. Sixteen years after Luther posted his theses, Calvin’s friend Nicolas Cop delivered an All Saints’ convocation heralding Christ as the sole mediator (not the “saints”). Some suspected this patently Protestant address was written by Calvin, and he soon found himself on the run.

As an exile, Calvin spent time in Basel, and seemingly by accident came to Geneva for a single night in 1536 on his way to Strasbourg for an ivory-tower, academic life of study and writing. The fiery Swiss reformer William Farel learned Calvin was in town and prevailed upon him to join the reformation cause in Geneva. Calvin acquiesced, and stayed there in Geneva — minus a three-year exile from 1538–1541 — until his death in 1564 at age 54.

The “Accidents” of Providence

Reformation Day is ripe for remembering an array of biblical truths — that the Scriptures are our only final authority (sola Scriptura); that God accepts us by grace alone, through faith alone, on the basis of Christ alone (justification); that God often uses the unlikeliest of people to turn the world upside down; that God doesn’t just raise up great individuals, but collections of people, veritable teams, each with his lot, and his own local cohort, to bring about widespread change; and all these conspiring to the glory of God alone (soli Deo gloria).

But here’s one to keep on your radar this year. God loves to use the seeming accidents in our lives to bring about his purposes. It’s the “accidents” that remind us we’re emphatically not the captain of our own soul, we’re not piloting our own destinies, we’re not on the block for planning the whole thing out and executing on it. How sad a course it would be if we cooked up the whole thing out as we came of age and spent the rest of our lives living out our boring and uncreative little visions?

That such a Reformation began almost 500 years ago, and continues to this day — this is your story too — is not the result of any human plan. It has been the “accidents” which have given it the markings of divine fingerprints — Luther’s accidental spark that first lit the flame and Calvin’s accidental lone night in Geneva that changed the course for that city and for a major branch of Protestant theology.

Reformation Day is a reminder to embrace the “accidents” in our lives, look for the hand of providence, and trust that his plans for us are better than our wildest dreams. For those who are his, he truly works together for their good all things — even and especially the seeming accidental — to do for us far more abundantly than all that we ask or think (Romans 8:28; Ephesians 3:20).

More for Reformation Day from Desiring God:

• eBook: Martin Luther: Lessons from His Life and Labor (free PDF, mobi, and epub)

• Book: John Calvin and His Passion for the Majesty of God (free PDF)

• eBook: Portrait of Calvin (free PDF, mobi, and epub)

• Book: With Calvin in the Theater of God: The Glory of Christ and Everyday Life (free PDF)

• Article: When Jesus Haunts Your Halloween

• Article: Sent into the Harvest: Halloween on Mission

• Article: Trick or Treat: It’s Martin Luther

• Video: After Darkness, Light: John Piper on John Calvin (on Location in Geneva) —

The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. (Luke 19:10)

Christianity is summed up in these words: Jesus came to seek and save the lost. If we were asked to describe in a sentence the heart of the gospel, there it is.

There is no other news like this. Every other religion says it backwards. Every other religion tells us to seek. We are advised to climb trees like Zacchaeus, to depend upon our own exertion for any hope of ascending to the divine. We are told to bridge the gulf by our effort. If you want salvation, they say, then seek it.

In a sense, that is the world — we live in a planet full of seekers. We are, in one way or another, tree-climbers, maneuvering ourselves to gain some advantage, to achieve some perspective, to find personal peace. And then Jesus comes.

We are lost in our own seeking until Jesus comes and says to us, “Hurry and come down” (Luke 19:5). Stop your searching. Stop trying to save yourself. I have come to seek and save the lost.

Our exertion is then silenced. All our seeking — our trying to reach the divine on our own — is silenced when we learn that the divine has reached down to us . . . by becoming one of us. Here we are, spinning our wheels in hopes of getting God, and then God, despite our belittling works, comes to get us. That gulf we couldn’t bridge is the burden he takes upon himself.

We were lost, sinners who rightly deserve God’s judgment. And Jesus came to take the judgment for us. He suffered in our place on the cross, was dead and buried, and then on the third day was raised to life. He ascended to the Father’s right hand from where he reigns over all. Jesus sought us, and he has saved us, if we trust him. Do you believe this? Do you feel the wonder of this salvation?

Jesus, you are the one who saves, not us. Thank you for rest, for hushing the furious winds of our faithless works. Thank you for stopping the strivings of our souls. Overcome us more and more with the glory of your grace, and make our posture toward others echo this summary of your gospel: “the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

Recent posts from Jonathan Parnell:

• Three Prayers for Facing Monday (Or Any Tomorrow)

• Jesus Doesn’t Love You Like That

• The Best Way to Start Your Everyday

Not everyone will believe the gospel. Why?

“God desires all people to be saved,” 1 Timothy 2:4 tells us. “God does not take pleasure in the death of anyone,” Ezekiel 18:32 says. Then why are there some who refuse to trust in Jesus and therefore die lost in their sins?

There are two different answers to this question.

But we should understand that these two answers go beyond making sense of God’s will of decree and will of command. Those “two wills” in God describe a biblical distinction that’s been expressed various ways in the Scriptures and throughout the centuries. God’s “two ways of willing,” writes John Piper, “implies that God decrees one state of affair while also willing and teaching that another state of affairs should come to pass” (Does God Desire All to Be Saved?, 16). This means that though God desires all people to be saved (his “will of command”), only those chosen in Christ will believe the gospel and be saved (his “will of decree”). But true as it is, this explanation still falls short of getting to the why. Why is this the case? Why does God not decree all that he prescribes?

And here is where we face those two different answers.

One answer is that there is something more powerful than God that is able to frustrate his will. It says that God is nice to desire all people to be saved, but he doesn’t have the strength to make it happen. The second answer says, in Piper’s words, “God wills not to save all, even though he ‘desires’ that all be saved, because there is something else that he wills or desires more, which would be lost if he exerted his sovereign power to save all” (emphasis added, 39).

The second answer is one that both Calvinists and Arminians can affirm. Both say that God doesn’t save everyone because he is committed to something more than saving everyone. The difference between Calvinists and Arminians is seen in what that higher commitment is.

Piper explains,

The answer the Arminians give is that human self-determination and the possible resulting love relationship with God are more valuable than saving all people by sovereign, efficacious grace. The answer the Reformed give is that the greater value is the manifestation of the full range of God’s glory in wrath and mercy (Romans 9:22–23) and the humbling of man so that he enjoys giving all credit to God for his salvation (1 Corinthians 1:29). (39)

So one explanation says that the higher commitment is God leaving the destiny of our eternal souls up to our own decision-making. The higher commitment is God securing our right to let our choices be the decisive factor in where we spend eternity. The other explanation — the Calvinist answer — says that God’s higher commitment is the full display of his glory. God’s glory wins, which means that his just wrath is poured out on all unrighteousness, and his mercy is lavished on all whom he loves.

God’s highest commitment — beyond his moral will that all people everywhere repent —is that the full panorama of his glory shine forth. That glory is his mercy, grace, steadfast love and faithfulness, and his refusal to by no means clear the guilty . . . so that the vessels of his mercy might know the riches of his glory (Exodus 34:6–7; Romans 9:23).

Related resources:

• Does God Desire All to Be Saved? (Crossway, 2013)

• God Desires All to Be Saved, and Grants Repentance to Some

• Ten Effects of Believing in the Five Points of Calvinism

I am writing this to plead with Christian parents to require obedience of their children. I am moved to write this by watching young children pay no attention to their parents’ requests, with no consequences. Parents tell a child two or three times to sit or stop and come or go, and after the third disobedience, they laughingly bribe the child. This may or may not get the behavior desired.

Last week, I saw two things that prompted this article. One was the killing of 13-year-old Andy Lopez in Santa Rosa, California, by police who thought he was about to shoot them with an assault rifle. It was a toy gun. What made this relevant was that the police said they told the boy two times to drop the gun. Instead he turned it on them. They fired.

I do not know the details of that situation or if Andy even heard the commands. So I can’t say for sure he was insubordinate. So my point here is not about young Lopez himself. It’s about a “what if.” What if he heard the police, and simply defied what they said? If that is true, it cost him his life. Such would be the price of disobeying proper authority.

A Tragedy in the Making

I witnessed such a scenario in the making on a plane last week. I watched a mother preparing her son to be shot.

I was sitting behind her and her son, who may have been seven years old. He was playing on his digital tablet. The flight attendant announced that all electronic devices should be turned off for take off. He didn’t turn it off. The mother didn’t require it. As the flight attendant walked by, she said he needed to turn it off and kept moving. He didn’t do it. The mother didn’t require it.

One last time, the flight attendant stood over them and said that the boy would need to give the device to his mother. He turned it off. When the flight attendant took her seat, the boy turned his device back on, and kept it on through the take off. The mother did nothing. I thought to myself, she is training him to be shot by police.

Rescue from Foolish Parenting

The defiance and laziness of unbelieving parents I can understand. I have biblical categories of the behavior of the spiritually blind. But the neglect of Christian parents perplexes me. What is behind the failure to require and receive obedience? I’m not sure. But it may be that these nine observations will help rescue some parents from the folly of laissez-faire parenting.

1. Requiring obedience of children is implicit in the biblical requirement that children obey their parents.

“Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right” (Ephesians 6:1). It makes no sense that God would require children to obey parents and yet not require parents to require obedience from the children. It is part of our job — to teach children the glory of a happy, submissive spirit to authorities that God has put in place. Parents represent God to small children, and it is deadly to train children to ignore the commands of God.

2. Obedience is a new-covenant, gospel category.

Obedience is not merely a “legal” category. It is a gospel category. Paul said that his gospel aim was “to bring about the obedience of faith” (Romans 1:5). He said, “I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me to bring the Gentiles to obedience — by word and deed” (Romans 15:18).

Paul’s aim was “to take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). He required it of the churches: “If anyone does not obey what we say in this letter, take note of that person, and have nothing to do with him” (2 Thessalonians 3:14).

Parents who do not teach their children to obey God’s appointed authorities prepare them for a life out of step with God’s word — a life out of step with the very gospel they desire to emphasize.

(If anyone doubts how crucial this doctrine is, please consider reading Wayne Grudem’s chapter, “Pleasing God by Our Obedience: A Neglected New Testament Teaching” in For the Fame of God’s Name, edited by Justin Taylor and Sam Storms.)

3. Requiring obedience of children is possible.

To watch parents act as if they are helpless in the presence of disobedient children is pitiful. God requires that children obey because it is possible for parents to require obedience. Little children, under a year old, can be shown effectively what they may not touch, bite, pull, poke, spit out, or shriek about. You are bigger than they are. Use your size to save them for joy, not sentence them to selfishness.

4. Requiring obedience should be practiced at home on inconsequential things so that it is possible in public on consequential things.

One explanation why children are out of control in public is that they have not been taught to obey at home. One reason for this is that many things at home don’t seem worth the battle. It’s easier to do it ourselves than to take the time and effort to deal with a child’s unwillingness to do it. But this simply trains children that obedience anywhere is optional. Consistency in requiring obedience at home will help your children be enjoyable in public.

5. It takes effort to require obedience, and it is worth it.

If you tell a child to stay in bed and he gets up anyway, it is simply easier to say, go back to bed, than to get up and deal with the disobedience. Parents are tired. I sympathize. For more than 40 years, I’ve had children under eighteen. Requiring obedience takes energy, both physically and emotionally. It is easier simply to let the children have their way.

The result? Uncontrollable children when it matters. They have learned how to work the angles. Mommy is powerless, and daddy is a patsy. They can read when you are about to explode. So they defy your words just short of that. This bears sour fruit for everyone. But the work it takes to be immediately consistent with every disobedience bears sweet fruit for parents, children, and others.

6. You can break the multi-generational dysfunction.

One reason parents don’t require discipline is they have never seen it done. They come from homes that had two modes: passivity and anger. They know they don’t want to parent in anger. The only alternative they know is passivity. There is good news: this can change. Parents can learn from the Bible and from wise people what is possible, what is commanded, what is wise, and how to do it in a spirit that is patient, firm, loving, and grounded in the gospel.

7. Gracious parenting leads children from external compliance to joyful willingness.

Children need to obey before they can process obedience through faith. When faith comes, the obedience which they have learned from fear and reward and respect will become the natural expression of faith. Not to require obedience before faith is folly. It’s not loving in the long run. It cuts deep furrows of disobedient habits that faith must then not infuse, but overcome.

8. Children whose parents require obedience are happier.

Laissez-faire parenting does not produce gracious, humble children. It produces brats. They are neither fun to be around, nor happy themselves. They are demanding and insolent. Their “freedom” is not a blessing to them or others. They are free the way a boat without a rudder is free. They are the victims of their whims. Sooner or later, these whims will be crossed. That spells misery. Or, even a deadly encounter with the police.

9. Requiring obedience is not the same as requiring perfection.

Since parents represent God to children — especially before they can know God through faith in the gospel — we show them both justice and mercy. Not every disobedience is punished. Some are noted, reproved, and passed over. There is no precise manual for this mixture. Children should learn from our parenting that the God of the gospel is a consuming fire (Hebrews 12:7, 29) and that he is patient and slow to anger (1 Timothy 1:16). In both cases — discipline and patience — the aim is quick, happy, thorough obedience. That’s what knowing God in Christ produces.

Parents, you can do this. It is a hard season. I’ve spent more than sixty percent of my life in it. But there is divine grace for this, and you will be richly rewarded.

More from John Piper:

• Why Require Unregenerate Children to Act Like They’re Good

• Hijacking Back Your Brain from Porn

• Pornography: The New Narcotic

“I think, therefore I am.” René Descartes penned this popular line in his 1637 treatise, Discourse on the Method, and it’s a good summary of the book itself. Heralding the importance of scientific discoveries and the necessity of doubting one’s own view of the world, Descartes’ work is often considered the first domino to fall in what is now called the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, with its explosion of scientific discoveries and philosophical arguments, had one task: to replace authority and tradition with reason and self-sufficiency.

For centuries, the existence of a divine being beyond our realm was largely assumed. When people talked of events in their lives such as miracles, disasters, and everything in between, they spoke of it as the will of some divine being. They were always looking vertically for their answers to life’s most essential questions. The Enlightenment, however, proposed that we must look horizontally at what is observable around us for such answers. Many of the questions that were settled for so many years became fair game in the eyes of the “enlightened” culture.

In regards to Christianity in particular, the Enlightenment hastily rejected any talk of divine authority or supernatural occurrences. While Christians believed so that they could understand reality, Enlighteners demanded that they only believe what they could understand. This seismic shift in worldview permeates our culture today, leaving Christians uneasy about the world and the world uneasy about Christians.

Authority and the Gospel

So although Enlightenment brought distrust for the authoritative claims of Christianity, we as Christians believe that we are servants of a God who has defined what is objectively true. What God says, who he is, is true reality for all people forever, whether a person accepts it or not.

But for the modern mind, this is foolish. Truth is not objective, but subjective, they say. In other words, it is constantly changing as we gather more data and learn more about the universe around us. Truth is often defined as what is best for the individual. If one man thinks it is acceptable to marry another man and you don’t, that’s your opinion. Your truth versus mine. And you can’t tell me otherwise. That’s the great escape of modern thinking.

To society, it is laughable that Christians gladly call themselves “servants” of God. Submitting to such an overarching authority is imprisonment, they must think. Christians are shackled by the very One who claims to set them free. Beyond all this, there is simply no observable, factual evidence that this God even exists. You can see their problem, right?

But for the Christian, being a follower of Christ is much more than adhering to a factual statement. We don’t simply say, “I’ve weighed all of the evidence and believe that the highest probability is that the Christian God exists.” That may be part of it, no doubt. But the hearts of believers experience more than a mental assent — there is an inner burning for the glory of the God who saved us. The apostle Paul tells us this in 2 Corinthians 4:3–6.

We are not simply fools chasing a unicorn through fields of four-leaf clovers. We have received “the knowledge of the glory of God.” This is why God’s authority is not an affront or an attack on our freedom. God has revealed himself to us through Jesus, and through Jesus we see that true freedom exists in submission to him in whom are pleasures forevermore (Psalm 16:11).

Truly Enlightened

The Enlightenment wasn’t entirely bad. In many ways, its focus on the mind should both embolden and humble us. In an age where God is not a foregone conclusion, we are driven to take Peter’s words seriously when he warned us to be ready to respectfully and gently give a defense for our hope (1 Peter 3:15). And we are reminded that we cannot simply sit on the sidelines and hope that people show up to our worship gatherings. We must humbly go, both to the ends of the earth and across the street.

The effects we feel today from past ideological shifts are neither a surprise nor a roadblock to God. He is in control. As such, the gospel frees us to abandon both fear and self-righteousness, to push aside gimmicks and coercion. No brow-beating or salesmanship required. We carry with us the message of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:18–19). We get to join the mission of a God “who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4).

As the truly enlightened citizens of the Kingdom, we get to marvel as God shines his light into the darkness of lost hearts, just like he did our own.

Related resources from John Piper:

• What Is the Christian Gospel? (article)

• God Strengthens Us by the Gospel (sermon)

• The Gospel in 6 Minutes (video)

Unclean spirits stir. Demonic thrones and dominions gather. Cosmic powers over this present darkness come to attention. And the devil himself, ready to devour and destroy, ignites his fiery darts and stretches his legs for the lion’s prowl.

As All Hallows’ Eve draws nigh, the spiritual forces of evil align, and Satan prepares his hordes for the party of the year — the grand harvest festival, celebration of darkness and death, when they pretend to be their strongest.

Halloween is almost here. But so is their final defeat. Jesus haunts their Halloween.

One Little Word

As the demonic rulers and authorities make ready, the one who sits in the heavens laughs (Psalm 2:4). To him, the devil is no threat, with all his orcs and goblins and the wickedest of witches. This is no evenly matched bout. If the incarnate Christ, in his humblest state, commands unclean spirits and they obey him (Mark 1:27) — how much more the risen and glorified Lord? Jesus does the real haunting.

Even as his adversaries marshal their best, they can’t escape serving his purposes. It is all through him and for him. “By him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities — all things were created through him and for him” (Colossians 1:16). Jesus haunts their Halloween.

No demon lurks apart from his will. No spirit pounces apart from his plan. He is sovereign over even the movements of evil minds. “God has put it into their hearts to carry out his purpose by being of one mind and handing over their royal power to the beast, until the words of God are fulfilled” (Revelation 17:17).

Luther nailed it — one little word shall fell them. Jesus haunts their Halloween.

He Put Them to Shame

It is precisely when the devil feigns to be his fiercest that Jesus delivers the deathblow. It was a Halloween-like gathering of ghouls and goblins at Golgotha when “he disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them” (Colossians 2:15).

Jesus came to conquer fear, to haunt whatever haunts. “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8). He stooped to share in our flesh and blood “that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery” (Hebrews 2:14–15).

Every Single One

Those who are in Christ have no need to fear the night. This is now our day. He has won it for us, and will not leave us to fend for ourselves in the devil’s domain. God “has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son” (Colossians 1:13). This we know: “he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world” (1 John 4:4).

“Take heart; I have overcome the world,” he says (John 16:33). Every inch of this universe — every single one — is his. And that includes All Hallows’ Eve and all its worst. He is the one who empowers us to “withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm” (Ephesians 6:13). And he says that just as he squashed the Serpent’s skull with his heel, so “the God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet” (Romans 16:20). Our feet. Get your boots.

Jesus haunts their Halloween. And so too he must haunt ours.

Dressed Up for Real

When Jesus haunts our Halloween, we “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 13:14) and “put on the new self” (Colossians 3:10). Dressed in the full armor of God, we “stand against the schemes of the devil” (Ephesians 6:11) on the exact night when he’d most want us to circle the wagons. We have a Book and will “not be outwitted by Satan; for we are not ignorant of his designs” (2 Corinthians 2:11). We take up the shield of faith “with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one” (Ephesians 6:16).

When Jesus haunts our Halloween, we pour in the extra energy and creativity to capitalize on this opportunity to meet new neighbors and go deep with the old — whether we’re ushering our kids from house to house or leaving our lights on and giving out the best candy.

Sent into the Harvest

When Jesus haunts our Halloween, we remember that our enemy is not the scariest-clad Halloween reveler, but “the god of this world” who has blinded their minds and keeps them “from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:4). We war not against unbelievers but “the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience” (Ephesians 2:2). We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but the rulers, authorities, cosmic powers over this present darkness, and spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (Ephesians 6:12).

When Jesus haunts our Halloween, we look on the cheekiest carousers with compassion — as “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36). On this night, as much as any, “the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few,” and so we “pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest” (Matthew 9:37–38). And we walk in faith to be those workers.

Freed from Fear

And when Jesus haunts our Halloween, we fight not only Satan, but fear in our souls. We see that our Halloween horrors reveal our lack of faith in who Jesus is, what he has accomplished, and that he has commissioned us.

When Jesus haunts our Halloween, we do not flee, but go on the offensive. “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (James 4:7). We don’t retreat, but resist — with level heads and open eyes. “Be soberminded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith” (1 Peter 5:8–9). We engage, with care and with courage.

Staring Death in the Face

When Jesus haunts our Halloween, we remember that the forces of evil, which we can be so prone to fear, are actually terrified of Jesus. Everyday is a spook for the devil and his demons, and Jesus does the haunting. The decisive blow has been dealt, and soon we will land the final punch.

Jesus has promised his gospel will advance (Matthew 24:14). He will build his church, and the gates of hell will not prevail (Matthew 16:18). And so when Jesus haunts our Halloween, we join the triumphant anthem:

“O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Corinthians 15:55–57)

More on Halloween from Desiring God:

• Sent into the Harvest: Halloween on Mission

• Trick or Treat: It’s Martin Luther

• True Holiness Befriends Sinners

This is one of those really deep, common truths — one which Jonathan Edwards expounds with the intellectual horsepower of a genius, and to which our most common experience testifies:

Essential to our present joy is the anticipation of greater joy to come.

This is why, for example, the best part of going on vacation is often the day before we start it. The glad anticipation of what will be compounds in the present and gives us a good feeling. But the closer we get to the last day of vacation, the more the joy diminishes. Sound familiar?

In American culture, the weekend can be a miniature version of this experience. After five days of work, many of us look forward to two days off on Saturday and Sunday. The height of anticipation comes Friday — TGIF! — but by Sunday evening the cheer is gone. Tomorrow we face Monday, with all its certain trials and trying uncertainties.

So how will you face it? How can we make the most of Sunday to prepare for the less-than-enthusiastic tomorrow?

In complement to corporate worship, here are three prayers for facing Monday:

1. Give me a brazen trust in your greatness and your goodness.

Whatever circumstances may come our way tomorrow, the most foundational truth we need to know is that God is in control, and that he is good. Many of us can recite the dinnertime prayer “God is great, God is good…” — but we need more than a good memory for this fact to take effect. We need faith. We need a brazen trust — an indomitable confidence — that our God rules the kingdom of men, that no purpose of his can be hindered, that all he pleases to do he does (Daniel 4:17; Job 42:2; Psalm 115:3). And that he abounds in steadfast love, that he is compassionate and merciful, that his nearness is our good (Exodus 34:6; James 5:11; Psalm 73:28).

Saying it is one thing; believing it is another. So we ask God for this faith.

2. Give me a humble heart towards the people I will encounter.

Most circumstances we face involve faces. Real people. People with their own stories. People with eternal souls. This means oftentimes how we face situations is really about how we relate to others. And what we need is humility. We need a deep, sincere sense that we are creatures. If the first prayer is to know the greatness and goodness of God, this second prayer is to know that greatness and goodness are original to him, not us. We are not that great. We are not that good.

Admitting this doesn’t come natural. So we ask God for this heart.

3. Give me the deep joy that because of Jesus, the best is always yet to come.

This is no cliché. No too-good-to-be-true platitude. For the Christian, the best is always, always, yet to come. The first two prayers come together in this one: a great God will judge all evil, a good God will show mercy, and Jesus vividly showed both for the helpless.

On the cross, Jesus simultaneously absorbed God’s wrath for sinners and demonstrated God’s love for sinners (Romans 3:25; 5:8). And because he did this, because we are united to him by faith, no circumstance in this life is worth comparing to the glory that will be revealed to us. The best is always yet to come. Even in eternity, as Edwards explains, we will never stop saying this.

And that is reason for unwavering celebration. So we ask for this deep joy.

Recent posts from Jonathan Parnell:

• Jesus Doesn’t Love You Like That

• The Best Way to Start Your Everyday

• Does Success Start on Sunday?

Christian preaching is not parroting.

As desirable as it is to copy a skilled communicator, and as unavoidable as it is to imitate those who have shaped us most, there is good reason for a preacher to find his own voice. Not vanity, but being true to what Christian preaching is.

Before it is heralding a message, preaching means first and foremost stewarding a message. Before we “preach the word” (2 Timothy 4:2), we should be devoted and unashamed students, “rightly handling the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15). Before telling others what God has to say, we must hear his voice ourselves and deeply know his speaking.

What’s New About Christian Preaching

This relationship between studying and preaching, between stewarding and heralding, gets at the heart of what it means to be a pastor in the church age, the time between Jesus’s ascension and return.

Throughout history, God has used spokesmen. Long ago, at many times, and in many ways, he spoke through the prophets, but in these last days, he has spoken to us in his Son (Hebrews 1:1–2). The apostles were the Son’s inspired spokesmen in their day, and still are in their writings. And now in the days of the church, a major way in which God’s word is re-revealed to his people is through the regular, ordinary, week-in, week-out ministry of local church pastor-preachers. This is a distinct season in redemptive history in which God’s heralds have been entrusted with “the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27) and with specific flocks to lead and feed.

“Pastoral Preaching”

This preaching particular to the church age is what Jason Meyer calls “pastoral preaching.” In Preaching: A Biblical Theology, he provides a whole-Bible picture of how God has worked through his spokesmen across history to bring his word to his people — and especially how that relates to preaching in the local church today.

In this new episode of Theology Refresh, Meyer challenges us to consider the task of preaching as first stewarding God’s revelation, and then heralding that revelation in such a way that the church encounters God in his word. Preachers are called to say to their flocks what God has to say, show their flocks where it comes from in the Bible, and shepherd their flocks where it leads. And, yes, it most emphatically does mean preaching the Old Testament in a distinctly Christian way — and relentlessly bringing gospel-centrality to bear in the pulpit.

To access this 12-minute episode, subscribe to Theology Refresh in iTunes, listen or watch at the resource page, download the audio, or watch below.

For more on Preaching: A Biblical Theology, see Desiring God’s 1-minute video with Meyer.

Recent episodes of Theology Refresh:

• Smiting the Green-Eyed Monster

• The Joy of Praising Others

• Giving the Gospel Graciously

• Church Planting and Missional Communities

• Simple Church Planting

To subscribe or see the full list of almost 50 episodes, visit Theology Refresh in the iTunes store.

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. (Colossians 3:16)

This verse from Colossians is so full of nourishment that there is no way to put the whole thing in our mouths at one time. It’s going to take a few blog bites to chew on it.

Today, all I want to do is chew on the first word: “let.” Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.

Another way to say it is, don’t stop the word of Christ from filling you to satisfaction. Or stop stopping it.

Here’s the thing: we are frequently impoverished spiritually by our own not letting ourselves be rich. On our shelves or bed stands or in our tablets or computers is a bank vault of “true riches” (Luke 16:11). But the pawnshop trinkets of worldly words are deceptively attractive. We can even be on our way to spend our time (the currency of life) on the riches in the vault and end up spending it in the pawnshops along the way.

What Paul wants us to do is neglect things that make us poor and not neglect things that make us truly rich.

What to Neglect

If the word of the Wall Street Journal or World Magazine or Wired Magazine or David Brooks or David Letterman or David McCullough, or John Mayer or John Steinbeck or John Paul II or John Calvin or Richard Dawkins or Richard Branson or Richard Baxter or Bono or Bach or blogs (even this one) dwells in you more richly than the word of Christ, you’re poor. You might be impressive at a dinner party or around a conference table or at small group. But you’re poor. You’re storing up dust.

You don’t need to be in the know.

You don’t need to be admired among the literati or respected in the guild. You don’t need an impressive net worth. You don’t need to be well traveled or well read. You don’t need to be conversant in Portlandia or know how many Twitter followers Taylor Swift has. You don’t need to be politically articulate, or up on the mommy blogs or the young, restless and reformed buzz. You don’t need to see the movie. You don’t need to read the novel. You don’t need to look hip.

What Not to Neglect

But what you desperately need, more than anything else in the world, is the word of Christ dwelling in you richly.

No one speaks like Jesus Christ (John 7:46). He is the Word of God and the Word that is God (John 1:1) He is the Word of Life (1 John 1:1) and when he speaks, his word is living and active (Hebrews 4:12) and he shows you the path of life (Psalm 16:11) and his words give you hope and joy and peace (Romans 15:13).

Jesus is the one human being in all of history who speaks the very words of eternal life (John 6:68) and when you listen and believe his word, it becomes your life (Deuteronomy 32:47), your food (John 6:51), your drink (John 4:14) and your light (Psalm 119:105).

Only Jesus has the words of life. Only him. That’s why the Father pleads with us, “This is my beloved Son; listen to him” (Mark 9:7).

Everyone else’s words are dust in the winds of time and to chase them is to chase the wind (Ecclesiastes 1:14). The precious few helpful, enlightening, even mortal life-preserving words are only of superficial help to us and in the end will blow away.

The only exceptions are those that help us (and others) listen to the word of Christ.

Let It!

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. Don’t neglect it. Listen to his word. Soak in his word. Memorize his word. Eat and chew it slowly. Don’t stop it from benefitting you.

Neglect the TV, blogs, social networks, video games, theaters, magazines, books, hobbies, chores, and pursuits that keep you from the Vault. Neglect the impoverishing pawnshop trinkets of words that will turn to dust in a day, a week, or a few years.

When it comes to life, time really is money. Time is how you spend your life. Don’t waste it. Spend your best time buying “true riches.”

Recent posts from Jon Bloom:

• How to Humbly Give and Receive Correction

• God’s Bright Design for Your Bitter Providences

• Hope for the Battle with Intractable Weakness

Jefferson Bethke has recently published Jesus > Religion: Why He Is So Much Better Than Trying Harder, Doing More, and Being Good Enough. The book’s title and content are inspired by his spoken-word video, “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus,” which has been viewed 26 million times. Yes, 26 million.

Filled with Jefferson’s own story, the book is raw and authentic. It will engage many, especially young people, who have been hurt by or given up on the church. His conviction and passion are contagious and inspire hope for the next generation of Jesus-lovers and leaders. In the end, Jesus > Religion is about grace — unconditional, scandalous, glorious grace. And we all — every one of us — could use more of that.

We wanted to give you a flavor for the book, so we pulled our fifteen favorite quotes.

“I heard enough sermons to know Jesus died for me, but I also had such a broken and painful life that I figured Jesus wasn’t relevant… I had just enough Jesus not to need him at all.” (3)

“Initially, I blamed God for the pain in my life, but slowly I started to hear the whisper of his grace. I didn’t know it then, but God broke me to fix me because he loved me.” (6)

“Grace isn’t there for some future me, but for the real me. The me who struggled. The me who was messy. The me who was addicted to porn. The me who didn’t have all the answers. The me who was insecure. He loved me in my mess; he was not waiting until I cleaned myself up.” (7)

“Be careful when you pursue truth, because you just might find him.” (35)

“Heaven isn’t a place for people who are scared of hell; it’s for people who love Jesus. The reason heaven is heavenly—full of joy, life, and bliss—is because we’ll be with Jesus.” (44)

“If you care more about flaunting your Christian freedom than promoting Christian unity, you’re probably not free. You are actually a slave to your so-called freedom.” (53)

“No one is more religious than the Christian who gives grace to everyone except the religious older-brother types. [God] gives grace to the younger and the older. No one is past redemption. No one is past grace. All God wants is for both the religious and the rebellious to come into the party.” (56)

“The truth is, God doesn’t grade on a curve; he grades on a cross… A grace economy is backward to most of us—those who think they qualify, don’t; and those who admit they don’t qualify, do.” (78-79)

“[The Bible] was not given to us so that we could highlight and underline our way into eternity, but in hopes that we would have a special encounter with our Creator.” (85)

“God’s ways aren’t our ways, but his ways save. Our ways don’t.” (89)

“When we become Christians, we begin to follow Jesus, but the moments when he completely obliterates our self-righteousness and gives us a potent dose of real, transforming grace is when following him becomes deeply special.” (132)

“That’s the truth with God’s grace. It’s not that we are holding on tight in hopes to not be seduced by our old life and sin, but rather it’s that God’s grace is so sweet and precious it compels us to stay with it. Grace is better music than sin.” (152)

“Our lives on earth aren’t just placeholders until we go to heaven. We are to create, cultivate, and redeem while we’re here… We are created to infect and infiltrate culture, restoring and reclaiming what is God’s.” (156, 172)

“The truth is, God doesn’t just want your ‘Christian’ things. He wants it all. When we realize the beauty of God’s grace in the mundane, not just the religious, that’s when we will begin to see him correctly.” (166)

“I saw that the church wasn’t a museum for good people; it was a hospital for the broken. Jesus wasn’t trying to create a place to show off his shiny employees; he wanted a place where his children could be healed.” (186)

Quotes are from Jefferson Bethke’s Jesus > Religion. Related resources from Desiring God:

• Lecrae Unwraps His Joy in Jesus

• Single, Satisfied, and Sent: Mission for the Not-Yet Married

• 20 Quotes from The Explicit Gospel (Chandler)

• Don't Waste Your Life (Piper)

What is the relationship between loving God and neighbor, and how can both Jesus and Paul say that loving our neighbor fulfills the law (Matthew 7:12; Romans 13:8; Galatians 5:14)? Isn’t love for God an even higher priority?

Moses helps us answer these questions in Deuteronomy 10:16–19, where he portrays a radical love of neighbor as the key test to measure whether we are loving God with all.

With an echo of the call to love God with all, Moses opens Deuteronomy 10 by calling Israel to maintain radical God-centeredness (Deuteronomy 10:12–13). Yahweh is always to be the blazing center in his people’s solar system. He then notes that such wholehearted, life-encompassing allegiance to God was warranted from Israel because he created them and because he rescued them from Egyptian slavery (Deuteronomy 10:14–15). In light of these truths, Moses then applies the call to radical love for God into Israel’s everyday lives, and in the process, he reveals how far they were from God’s ideal. I see five significant points regarding love for God in these verses.

1. Loving God with all is a heart issue (verse 16).

Moses first charges Israel to “circumcise the foreskin of your heart, and be no longer stubborn” (Deuteronomy 10:16). Israel was hardhearted, and hardhearted people cannot love God. Indeed, their hardness went deep, controlling the core of their very identities. As Moses said in the previous chapter, “You are a stubborn people. . . . From the day you came out of the land of Egypt until you came to this place, you have been rebellious against the LORD” (Deuteronomy 9:6–7). Until their hearts got fixed, love would not be evident.

2. Loving God with all is an idolatry issue (verse 17).

The reason why hardheartedness is such a problem is because God rightfully demands all our allegiance, and any hardness toward him is an idolatry problem. “For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God” (Deuteronomy 10:17). Yahweh is the only God in the pantheon of heaven (Deuteronomy 5:7; 6:4), and therefore he alone holds the right to our absolute surrender (Deuteronomy 5:8–10; 6:5). He alone is the preeminent savior, sovereign, and satisfier, and therefore misplaced affections are foolish and suicidal. God is to be the sun in our solar system, not one of the planets circling us. Idolatry separates us from love.

3. Loving God with all is about being like God (verses 17–18).

It is at this point in Moses’s sermon that we begin to see more clearly how intimately he tied the call to love our neighbor with the call to love God. Indeed, implied in the text is that those who have hearts of love toward God will ultimately begin to resemble God himself, who “is not partial and takes no bribe. He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing” (Deuteronomy 10:17–18).

Idolatry of the heart is seen in a failure to love as God loves. Love for God is displayed in whether we are willing to love our neighbor, even those who are most difficult to love –– to sacrifice our time, treasures, and talents for the sake of those whom God loves.

In my own life, I feel that only recently have I begun to understand what it means to love God in this radical neighbor-love way. Over the last five years, my family has journeyed the road of trans-racial, international adoption, seeing the curse of orphan status broken in the lives of three little treasures. By faith the saints of old “were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, . . . were tortured . . . suffered mocking . . . of whom the world was not worthy” (Hebrews 11:34–38).

Radical neighbor-love magnifies the worth of God, regardless of the cost, and displays the type of love God himself has shown. “Whoever would be great among you must be your servant . . . even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve” (Matthew 20:26, 28). “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matthew 9:12–13). May God help us love this way.

4. Loving God with all is about loving as we have been loved (verse 19).

Having identified the hardness, idolatry, and godlessness of his hearers, Moses now urges them to love the broken –– to see their hearts surrendered wholly to Yahweh’s supremacy, manifest in care for the needy: “Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 10:19). Loving God with all is about loving others as we ourselves have been loved. Israel knew what neglect, abuse, emptiness, hunger, and poverty were like; they had experienced all these in their past. They knew what it meant to be dirty, and they knew what it meant to be redeemed. Believers today have experienced an even greater redemption through the victorious work of Christ Jesus. Sins are forgiven, and righteousness is won. And “if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 John 4:11).

Radical neighbor-love is birthed in the soul of one who has tasted the sin-overcoming, mercy-saturating, joy-filling love of God, now manifest in the person of Christ. “We love because he first loved us” (4:19). Loving the broken is overflow from the life that has been filled with love from God. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20).

5. Loving God with all is a miracle of grace.

Many recognize how difficult it is to pour out our own resources in love for the hurting, the weak, and the marginalized. Love for the broken is messy and wearying and unattractive, apart from the amazing grace of God. In the end, this kind of radical neighbor-love is impossible without God’s help (Deuteronomy 29:4), and therefore it becomes a key test for knowing whether we are connected to the source of love.

More from Jason DeRouchie:

• Love God with Your Everything

• Psalm 121: What It Means That Yahweh Is Your Guardian

• What the Old Testament Authors Really Cared About: A Survey of Jesus’ Bible

Is it a sin for me to drink alcohol?

It could be, says Pastor John in today’s episode of the Ask Pastor John podcast.

“I’m a default teetotaler,” he says. “And what that means is if I have my choice, I don’t drink alcohol, but I might, to be a good guest. . . . But I don’t think anybody can make a case from Scripture that teetotalism is required.”

So what’s his case? Pastor John explains in today’s podcast (episode #200):

YouTube

Also, this week we introduced Ask Pastor John podcast videos to YouTube — yes, videos. But if you’re expecting video footage of Pastor John answering questions, you’ll be sorely disappointed. We have taken the audio recording, set it to a photo, and made it into a video to reach new audiences of YouTubers. Find those available videos here.

As an example, here’s how episode 79 — “How to Fight Laziness” — appears:

Tuning In

Ask Pastor John is a daily podcast series of 3–8 minute conversations released each weekday at 10:30am (EST) through the DG Facebook and Twitter feeds. You can tune in to the new episodes through the free Ask Pastor John mobile app for iPhone and Android. We’re currently hosting all the recordings on SoundCloud, a website making it easy to listen to several of the podcasts in one sitting. They’re also archived on the DG website, syndicated in iTunes, and select episodes are being adapted to video and offered in DG’s YouTube channel.

We want to hear from you. To submit a question to Pastor John please include your first name, hometown, and brief question via email: AskPastorJohn AT desiringGod DOT org.

Thanks for listening to the podcasts. We appreciate your engagement and interest.

How is the gospel real to you? This was a question that I was asked in college.

As part of a campus ministry, I heard the word “gospel” thrown around a lot, but as for how it was real to me, that wasn’t as easy to explain. The short answer was that the gospel is real to me because it’s how God saved me. The truth of the gospel is alive to me because by it God made me alive. But as I looked closer at God’s work in my life, I began to notice a “tangible remnant” of Jesus’s love for me. It’s embedded deep in my story as a Hmong-American. Let me explain.

Meet the Hmong

If you’re familiar with the Twin Cities of Minnesota, you’ve heard about a people group called the Hmong (the H is silent). We are a group of war refugees that immigrated to the Midwest in the late 1970s and early 80s, because of the Vietnam War. In the Twin Cities metro, there are over 66,000 Hmong people — the largest concentration of Hmong in the United States.

The Hmong are an agricultural people group, known as the “hill tribe,” originating from the mountains of Laos. Some historians even trace them back to western China. Many of the Hmong people were persecuted by the surrounding Laotians and Thais because of their independent way of life and unwillingness to conform to the dominant society. In fact, the reason the Hmong people lived among the mountains is because they wanted to be independent, even though it’s a harder agricultural lifestyle when compared to the fertile low land.

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. government allied with the Hmong because of the Hmong’s strong anti-communist views. Hmong men were trained to conduct hit-and-run tactics against the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), guard secret U.S. radar stations and bases, and rescue American pilots shot down over Laos and Vietnam. A promise was made that anyone who fought with the Americans would get a free pass to the States if the war was lost and the Hmong no longer had a home. Many of the young Hmong men joined up and started fighting against the communists, that is, the NVA and local Laotian communist groups.

My father was one of these men.

Meet My Dad

My father and his brothers were recruited by the CIA and trained in guerrilla warfare. They were paid a small wage and given weapons to fight for the United States.

After the Fall of Saigon in 1975, the American troops moved out of Vietnam and all of South East Asia, including the villages of their Hmong allies in northern Laos. Left completely vulnerable to the communists, many Hmong people were hunted down and killed. The communist soldiers invaded one village after another, killing the children, raping the women, and torturing the men to death. Many were sent to “re-education camps” and were never heard from again.

Some Hmong people were given asylum in the States, but the majority of them where left behind to fend for themselves. To escape this genocide, the Hmong people started fleeing west towards Thailand. Parents carried their children into hiding and slowly made their way through dense jungle, until they came to the Mekong River (the Mississippi River of Southeast Asia). Crossing the Mekong River had to be done at night, in the dark, with makeshift floatation devices from bamboo. Many Hmong people drowned on this river because of enemy attacks, the strong current, and harsh conditions. (Both my parents lost their spouses at the Mekong crossing and were widowed when they met each other in Thailand.) If they crossed the river, then they would be able to settle in the refugee camps in Thailand. That is where my siblings and I were born, and where I spent the first five years of my life.

When We Moved to America

Since my father fought for the United States, it was easier for him to get a pass to the country. I still remember going through customs and getting my picture taken for my residential alien card. I was entering a brand-new world. It wasn’t until about seven years ago that my grandmother told me the whole history of my father back in Laos.

He never talked about it, but my father, in the midst of intense hardship, was a leader in his village. He had a commanding presence and was highly respected by the other men. He would have been considered as something similar to a mayor.

But when the opportunity came for him to move his family to America, he left it all. Away from his work, away from his comfort, away from his high social status — my father walked away from it all to live in a country whose language he didn’t speak and whose culture he didn’t know. He abandoned his authority, and the respect he had won, to welcome jobs and endure insults sadly typical for a middle-aged immigrant in America who doesn’t speak English.

And he did it so that his children would have a better life. I didn’t know what I needed. I didn’t know the extent of the danger around me. But my father became nothing so that my siblings and I could live in peace.

My father has worked hard to provide for us, but even more than that, he has fought for our family as our spiritual leader. When I was in high school, I remember waking up early one morning to find him kneeling in his dirty work clothes, praying for each of his children by name. That image has stayed with me since, and I would learn that he and my mother repeated this routine everyday before he left for a long day of work.

The Greatest Kind of Love

The message of the gospel is that we need a Savior. We’ve turned away from God in our sin and deserve his wrath. But Jesus, though he was rich, became poor for us so that we, in his poverty, might become rich (2 Corinthians 8:9). He left his status so that we might know a new one: righteous, forgiven, at peace with God.

So how is this real to me? How do I stay alive to the gospel’s wonder?

Everyday I see glimmers of the gospel’s light in my father. He is a simple man in American terms. He still doesn’t speak English. He doesn’t have an education. He works hard with his hands to earn a living. But for three decades, he has preached the gospel to me with his words, and exemplified it with his life. He laid his life down for my siblings and me, which as Jesus says, is the way that he loves, and the greatest kind of all (John 15:12–13).

Related resources from John Piper:

• What Is the Christian Gospel? (article)

• God Strengthens Us by the Gospel (sermon)

• The Gospel in 6 Minutes (video)

Sometimes a whole world — a whole theology — hangs on a word.

Consider the word “this” in Ephesians 2:8. Does it refer to “faith” or “grace” or both? Is faith a gift of God?

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not from you; it is the gift of God.

What does “this” refer to? “And this is not from you; it is the gift of God.” What is its antecedent? The question is not settled by the fact that in Greek “this” is singular and neuter, while “grace” and “faith” are both feminine. “This” is just as ambiguous in Greek as it is in English.

Faith As a Gift

But consider these four pointers to seeing faith as a gift in Ephesians 2:8.

1. When Paul says “this is not from you, it is the gift of God,” he seems to be referring to the whole process of grace-faith-salvation. That may be why “this” is neuter and not feminine.

2. But more important than that is the way Paul uses the phrase “by grace you have been saved” back in verse 5. In verse 8, he says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith.” Back in verse 5, he said, “When we were dead in our trespasses, [God] made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved — and raised us up with him.”

This is striking. Paul breaks the flow of his sentence in order to insert “by grace you have been saved.” And he does it precisely after saying, “When we were dead, God made us alive.” Why does he insert “by grace you are saved” just here?

Is it not because he wants to make clear the true nature of grace? He made you alive when you were dead — by grace you are saved! This grace is God’s free act of giving life to the dead. By inserting “by grace are you saved” immediately after saying “when you were dead, God raised you,” he shows that this saving grace is not caused by our participation. We are dead when it happens to us. This saving grace is resurrection of the dead.

So when Paul gets to verse 8, one of the reasons he repeats, “By grace you have been saved,” is to describe how we experience this divine miracle of being raised from the dead. He adds “through faith.” “For by grace you have been saved through faith.” In other words, the life God creates by grace out of death is experienced in our believing. Our believing is what this new life does that grace creates. So faith is the creation of grace. Therefore, it is part of the gift in verse 8 that is not from ourselves.

3. This is confirmed in verse 10 when Paul actually uses the language of “creation” to describe our new life as believers: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus.” The language of “creation” confirms that when God “made us alive” (verse 5), we were not part of the cause.

Things that are created do not cause their creation. The existence of a new believer is a “creation in Christ Jesus.” And that confirms that this new believing is part of the gift in verse 8. Our faith is a gift of God.

4. Finally, consider that Paul says the same in Philippians 1:29 — that our faith is a gift: “It has been given to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake.” Literally: “It has been given to you to trust him.”

A Different World

So when Paul says, “By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you, it is the gift of God,” part of his meaning is that our faith is a gift of God. It is a divine creation. It is the work of grace when we were dead. It is not “from ourselves.” Therefore, our faith is the mark of being chosen by God. He chose to give us faith.

A whole world — a whole theology — hangs on a word. “This is not from yourselves.” “It is the gift of God.” That is, faith is not from yourselves. Faith is a gift of God.

To believe this changes everything. You live in a different world if you believe this. We will be discovering the wonders of this world for all eternity.

Recent posts from John Piper:

• Hijacking Back Your Brain from Porn

• Pornography: The New Narcotic

• How to Be Interesting and Unhelpful

I dropped my son off at his school and yelled my usual through the rolled down window, “I love you. Make good choices. Obey your teacher.” As I began to roll up the window and drive away, my little first grader took his small hand to his mouth and blew me a kiss.

It was like everything stopped at that moment.

I realized how quickly this season would last. Would he blow me a kiss when he’s 16 years old? I don’t know. I blew him a kiss back and he waved to me, mouthing the words “Bye, Mom.” I was overwhelmed. I wished I could freeze that point in time.

Sweet Ragamuffins

I like to call my children sweet ragamuffins. Motherhood is challenging. My kids don’t obey me every time I ask them to do something. They are rambunctious, loud, and messy. And they are sweet. They are gifts. Like many moms, I wouldn’t trade it for anything. What I think we can so often forget, though, is that motherhood isn’t a task to be checked off like laundry. It is a calling.

Maybe the word “calling” makes you want to run and hide. For many, “calling” can sound as if motherhood is your only identity, that is all encompassing and you never get a break from your endless responsibilities. This is not true. You are likely called to be a wife and church member and friend as well (and the list could go on). So motherhood is not your only identity; it is a part of your identity. And there is a weight to that. Mothers are more than just mothers, but we are never less. God’s word instructs us to train up our children in the way they should go (Proverbs 22:6). I can’t think of a greater challenge given to us parents. As one in the throes of raising and teaching young children, I am desperate for Jesus.

Gifts to Enjoy

But I don’t think remembering the responsibility to train our children is the best way we embrace and savor these short days we have with them. Remember that “every good and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights…” (James 1:17). Our children are not tasks to complete, but gifts to enjoy. And we do this by remembering that they are truly gifts from God. Yes, even when they stand in the hall refusing to put away their socks, or when they throw their cereal on the floor, or when they make it almost impossible to complete a trip to the grocery store. Those are trials mothers face weekly and yes, even they are gifts.

Paul, instructing Timothy to challenge the rich to put their hope in God instead of their wealth, reminds us that it is God who provides all things for our enjoyment (1 Timothy 6:17). Our children aren’t meant to be checked off a list. They are to be delighted in. As with every gift we receive, we must be careful not to idolize our children. Only God should be worshipped. But what if we began to think of our kids as true gifts from God aimed at our enjoyment, both in our kids and in God through them.

A Call to Treasure

I think of how much I enjoy looking at colorful birds at the zoo. They are exotic creatures, each with their unique beaks and beautiful mosaic of feathers. They are a wonder of God’s creation, and he cares for them. But not more than he cares for us: “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” (Matthew 6:26).

In a similar way, I can think of many things I enjoy, but I value my kids more. I love looking into my kids’ precious eyes. I want to get into the world of their God-given personalities and take in their laughs and answer their questions. I want to enjoy them.

Maybe that’s precisely what the main thing of this mommy calling is all about. Maybe it’s not as much a call to train your kids as it is a call to treasure them.

Our children won’t be our little children forever. Let’s enjoy these days that God has given us. They are his gifts, glimmers of his goodness, which leads us to say with Lewis, “What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary sparkles are like this!”

More from Grace at Home:

• It’s Good to Be a Jar of Clay

• Grace Greater Than All Our Worries

• The Most Frightening Prayer I Could Pray for My Children

The cows started writing on billboards in the Twin Cities metro earlier this year. End of Burgerz — Koming Soon.

These bovines can’t spell, but we got the message — especially those of us Minnesotans who are transplants from the South. Here comes Chick-fil-A, at long last. Time to Eat Mor Chikin.

Christian Roots and Controversy

It’s no secret the chain was founded by an unapologetic Christian from the Atlanta-area. Now in his nineties, Truett Cathy has operated his restaurants on overtly Christian principles since the 1940s. His son, Dan, the franchise president, is known for his support of Christian causes and his opposition to so-called same-sex marriage, which drew national attention last year.

For the Cathy family, it goes deeper than closing on Sundays, playing Christian music, and putting “glorify God” in the corporate purpose statement. For decades, they have tried to apply the biblical worldview and ethic not just to the surface, but to press it into the culture of the chain, not only in the dining room but behind closed doors.

Learning Bible from Chick-fil-A

As I made my first visit to a stand-alone Chick-fil-A here in the Twin Cities last week, and then consulted Truett’s book, I noticed five biblical principles, among others, at work in the corporate culture — principles our local churches and leaders might benefit from being reminded of.

Let this much be clear: The church doesn’t need Chick-fil-A. We don’t need successful Christian businesses, athletes, films, and reality shows for the advance of the gospel. The tip of the spear is the local church. But when we can glean a few pointers from another body reading our Book, we might as well take notice.

1. Numbers Are Not the Name of the Game.

This may be the key insight for Chick-fil-A over and against other franchises. From the beginning, Truett has strained to show that it’s not simply about the bottom line. “Profit is not the name of the game,” he says. “It is only the scorecard for some of our accomplishments” (How Did You Do It, Truett? 55).

The effects of this emphasis are pervasive in the company’s culture. It makes it possible to close all day Sunday, and observe the six-and-one creation principle (Genesis 2:2), when other restaurants make more than 20% of their sales this day. It encourages the leadership to focus relentlessly on long-term health and stave off the endless temptations to cut corners for short-term growth and “success.” It leads to concentration on the quality of the chain, and each individual operator and restaurant, rather than outrunning the supply lines and compromising quality for quantity of stores and sales. Which means growing more slowly — and taking so long to get to Minnesota! — rather than swelling as quickly as possible. Truett writes,

To succeed we knew we had to start small and grow slowly. This is where so many start-up companies today make their mistake. Dreamers dream big, and they want to reach their goals quickly. There’s nothing wrong with big dreams. But my experience tells me that we’re more likely to reach our dreams if we climb with care and caution, putting one foot in front of the other. To some, this may be the biggest sacrifice of all — giving up the dream of instant “success.” (17–18)

It’s a helpful reminder in the church about something we should have learned long ago. It’s not a numbers game. Discipling the nations (Matthew 28:19) is not only about quantity, but mainly quality. When well-established and constantly called to mind, this principle has a pervasive effect in the local church as well.

2. Keep the Bathrooms Clean.

Truett says, “Keeping [the restroom] clean doesn’t require special skill, just discipline that comes from being concerned for the customer” (47). Put another way, Do unto others — it’s Jesus’s “Golden Rule” (Matthew 7:12; Luke 6:31), which, “You can’t beat . . . as a business philosophy.” One of Truett’s most common sayings is “Courtesy is cheap, but it pays great dividends” (35).

Sadly, some local churches drift into the mindset that the cleanliness of the facilities and the care of the grounds aren’t important — after all, the church’s real business is spiritual. But such is a failure to demonstrate Christian love and kindness. It’s a missed opportunity to consider others more significant than ourselves and look to their interests (Philippians 2:3–4) and serve.

“If you really aren’t interested in serving others,” says Truett, “you don’t need to be in the restaurant business in the first place” (37). The same is true for pastors, elders, and church staff. The church’s leaders and employees are there not to be served, but to serve.

3. Go the Extra Mile — With Joy.

It’s my pleasure. That’s the response you’ll often get when you thank a Chick-fil-A employee for their service. And those of us at Desiring God like to point out that it’s not just Christian, but Christian Hedonistic. It’s part of “second-mile service,” with roots in Matthew 5:41. It’s not just the Golden Rule, but more — making the extra effort and taking the initiative to serve the customer in surprising ways.

How much more should this be true in church leadership. We both aim at creating joy, and do so fueled by joy. We pastors and elders endeavor for our people’s “progress and joy in the faith” (Philippians 1:25). We are workers with our people for their joy (2 Corinthians 1:24). And we bend every effort to “do this with joy and not with groaning” (Hebrews 13:17). It’s my pleasure, as an authentic expression of a joy-filled heart of service, is a beautiful pastoral response to our people’s words of gratitude.

4. Cultivate Trust Among the Leadership.

Fostering trust among a growing leadership team is seriously time-consuming. Without being free from a bottom-line-only focus, it’s doubtful it will happen. But such trust-building, says senior vice president Perry Ragsdale, is “the biggest key to our success” (56).

Chick-fil-A won’t take on new franchise owners just because they have the money. More important than funds is character, integrity, and trust. Which makes finding new operators a lengthy process and slows down the speed of how quickly the chain could expand otherwise. But it’s worth it in the long run. Says Truett, “The most important decision we make at Chick-fil-A is selecting restaurant Operators . . . . Our franchise Operators determine the success of the chain” (64).

But not only does the franchise carefully guard the gate, but once leaders are in, they seek to cultivate among them an openness to dialogue, discuss, and disagree. When leaders have been carefully chosen on the front end, and there’s intentional effort to grow trust among the team, asking questions and expressing concerns becomes a huge asset, rather than threat, to the organization. And so with pastors and elders in the local church.

5. Keep the Main Thing Central.

The name Chick-fil-A has limited what the chain can do. There is plenty of room to try new things and add waffle fries, chicken nuggets, or desserts, but with chicken in the name, they won’t offer pork or beef. And that unbending commitment to what is central has produced big payoffs in the long haul with brand and mission clarity.

The Christian church is a “creature of the gospel” — created and sustained by the gospel, for the defense and advance of the gospel. The church is “a pillar and buttress of the truth” of the gospel (1 Timothy 3:15). It is the good news that Jesus saves sinners that is “of first importance” (1 Corinthians 15:3), that is our heart and center, that must be affecting and shaping all we do. The church is a veritable Gospel-fil-A.

We do more than just preach the gospel. We must. But we must do the other things in right relationship with our essential message. It is so easy to get distracted from the main thing. It’s so common for wonderful peripheral things to slowly displace the center.

Amidst all the complexities of growth and contextualizing for new locations and demographics, Chick-fil-A has kept chicken central. How much more must the church labor and strain — with great gladness and deep joy — to keep the gospel of Jesus at the very heart of who we are and all we do.

Recent posts from David Mathis:

• A Reason to Be Really Offended

• Grace Gone Wild

• The X-Factor in Bible Reading

Either Jesus died to save his church or he didn’t. There isn’t a third option.

Either he gave himself up for his bride, as Ephesians 5:25 tells us, or he died to create the possibility of her salvation that depends upon the skills of human decision-making.

Are we dead in our sins, as Ephesians 2:1–3 says, or are we slightly impaired? Are we “far from the peaceful shore” or are we gone, sunken to the bottom of the ocean with no chance of resuscitation? Does God toss us a floatation device, or does he raise us from the dead?

Was the cross of Christ a triumph over sin and evil, as Colossians 2:14–15 says, or was it just a nice first-move? Is Jesus victorious for the sake of his church, or did he spot us a few points? Did he suffer at Golgotha to demonstrate God’s grace to sinners, or was it a presentation of sorta-kinda-maybe hope for those smart enough to understand?

Did Jesus drain the dregs of God’s wrath meant for his people, or did he merely mute original sin and leave the destiny of our eternal souls in our own hands?

How we answer these questions has everything to do with what we think about our sin and the glory of Jesus, and therefore, it gets at the heart of the gospel.

What makes the gospel good news? Is it only the potential to be saved, which would grossly miscalculate human ability and undermine the blood of Jesus, or is it the declaration, “It is finished!” — that Jesus has demolished every obstacle that keeps his people from everlasting joy in God?

The Bible is clear. The gospel is God’s work, God’s victory. “He does everything, first to last, that is involved in bringing man from death in sin to life in glory: he plans, achieves and communicates redemption, calls and keeps, justifies, sanctifies, glorifies” (Packer, Quest for Godliness, 130). And here is where we see his love — the kind that breaks through the sternest soul in sovereign power to save. The love of Jesus is sin-crushing, serpent-stomping, death-defying, people-purchasing love.

Softly and tenderly tip-toeing around the doors of our heart, giving his life to give us a chance, crossing his fingers that we will invite him into our lives . . .
no, Jesus doesn’t love us like that.

Related resources:

• From Heaven He Came and Sought Her: Definite Atonement in Historical, Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspective (November 30, 2013)

• Limited Atonement (“What We Believe About the Five Points of Calvinism”)

• New Course on Calvinism from John Piper

His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire. –2 Peter 1:3–4

If we’re honest, we’re all hungry. We’re starving for something to sustain us, to preserve our hope, to strengthen us through trials, to help us conquer sin. We’re starving for food that will fill us for the everyday fight of faith.

But what does the fight look like? And how do we find the food we need?

Our Aim

Our aim is to be with God and like God, to “become partakers of the divine nature” (1:4). Peter wants us to enjoy greater and greater fellowship and intimacy with God by becoming like him, by growing in godliness. We enjoy more life by being more like God, who is Life.

If we’re not careful, we easily slip into other aims that will rob us of life, aims that promise much and ultimately deliver very little — selfish gain, lustful thoughts, godless obsessions, excessive consumption, restless laziness. These aims may be easy and temporarily pleasing, but they only leave us hungrier. What our souls need is God.

If you’re believing in Jesus, forgiven and rescued from your sin, you are and will be still imperfect and broken. Our new aim in this new life is not perfection, as if that could earn us a place in heaven. Our aim is to live lives that are more and more pleasing to the Lord we love, and, by doing so, to experience more and more life and joy in him.

Our Adversary

So if that’s our aim, what’s in our way? In order to be like God, we must escape “the corruption of sinful desire” (1:4). Our greatest obstacle to enjoying more of God is our own corrupt desires. They’re striving to starve our hungry souls and leave us begging for scraps along the highway of eternity. God knows better, and he offers us better.

The reality is I will suffer in this life, people will sin against me, and the devil lies in secret plotting to steal my hope and faith. But my greatest adversary is not suffering, sinners, or Satan. It’s me –– the lingering sin yet in my heart.

If we want to know God, be like him, be with him, we must be continually rescued from our sin in this life. For lovers of Jesus, this war has already been decided, and we’re now working out our victory every day until Jesus returns and ends the war once for all.

Jesus did the decisive work once for all on the cross, but we have a role to play. We have real choices to make. We must take steps to confront this enemy within us and be killing him.

Our Ability

The death of my sin sounds really sweet, until of course I try to kill it. Our greatest adversary, sin, is also our greatest handicap. It’s perfectly positioned to undermine the great aim of our new life. Praise God he doesn’t stake the battle on our ability. “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness…”

The way to enjoy more of God is to live like him. And the power to live like him is not yours, but his. We find sure help in God’s hands, in his power — the power that formed mountains, that dug rivers, that lights stars, and breathes life into bears, sharks, and bald eagles; the power that establishes the universe, governs the nations, and judges all people. When you live by that power, you lack nothing on the road to godliness.

Our Ammo

God “has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature” (1:4). The ammunition for our daily battles are God’s promises — specific, blood-bought promises. This is the feast. When your hungry soul groans, this is what it wants. These promises are specific. You can find them, understand them, memorize them, and share them.

When we’re physically hungry, we don’t just talk about what food is. We find real food — a turkey sandwich on wheat, a Wendy’s cheeseburger with chili, a grilled chicken salad, some trail mix, or a Cliff bar. The idea of food does nothing for our hunger if we don’t identity something specific and edible and put it in our mouth.

The same applies to God’s promises. We don’t win battles over sin, suffering, and Satan by just acknowledging we need promises. No! What are they? How do they keep me from sinning or despairing or doubting? If promises are going to fulfill their God-given purpose, we have to know them, rehearse them, and voice them to one another. Promises like these:

We all are being transformed into the image [of Christ]. (2 Corinthians 3:18)

[God] will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore. (Revelation 21:4)

He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. (Philippians 1:6)

Eat Up

At least as often as your stomach gets hungry, your heart and soul get hungry. Look for God’s promises when you read the Bible, specific promises, and feed your hungry soul. Eat them. Eat them every day and throughout the day. Eat full meals. Eat snacks. Eat planned meals. Eat spontaneously.

And as you do, you will become more like God. And as you become more like him, you will experience more of the abundant life he has given you and less of the sin from which he has rescued you.

Of the many trees in the Garden, God banned Adam and Eve from eating from one — just one (Genesis 2:16–17, 3:1–3, 11). Why?

John Piper recently gave the question some fresh thinking, which he shares in today’s episode of Ask Pastor John:

The function of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is to make sure that the pleasures of all the other trees in the garden are supremely pleasures in God.

The command went like this: “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die’” (Genesis 2:16–17).

So what was God saying in prohibiting the eating of one tree out of a million trees? He was saying, “I have given you life. I have given you a world full of pleasure, pleasures of taste and sight and sound and smell and feel and nourishment. Only one tree is forbidden to you. And the point of that prohibition is to preserve the pleasures of the world, because if you eat of that one you will be saying to me, ‘I’m smarter than you. I am more authoritative that you. I am wiser than you are. I think I can care for myself better than you care for me. You are not a very good Father. And so I am going to reject you.’ So don’t eat from the tree, because you will be rejecting me and all my good gifts and all my wisdom and all my care. Instead, keep on submitting to my will. Keep on affirming my wisdom. Keep on being thankful for my generosity. Keep on trusting me as a Father and keep on eating these trees as a way of enjoying me. There are 10,000 trees, every imaginable fruit. Just go eat. Be thankful. I have given them to you and see them as expressions of my goodness and savor them that way.”

And Satan comes along, and he takes that arrangement and says, “Hey, Eve, the meaning of that arrangement is: God is selfish. God is stingy. He is a skinflint.” So he took the prohibition of one suicidal tree and treated it as a prohibition of everything.

So the issue of the tree is this: Will we keep looking to God as the giver and lover and treasure of this garden so that all our eating is thanking and all our savoring is a savoring of God? Will we keep on experiencing every one of these tastes as a tasting of something like what God is, and in that sense a tasting of God? Will we keep on enjoying God in the enjoying of the trees?

That is what the forbidden tree was there to test.

I think a lot of people try to set that up as merely arbitrary: Will man obey? Or will he not obey? And they don’t put it in the context of his fatherly care and all the goods that he has given. I don’t think it is arbitrary like that.

It was a warning. “If you choose independence instead of God-dependence, you will lose the pleasure of the garden and God with it.”

“If you keep trusting me and enjoying me as your greatest delight and highest treasure, you will have this garden and I will be the pleasure of all your pleasures.”

The forbidding one tree is a way of securing that the pleasures of all the other trees in the garden are supremely pleasures in God.

You can listen to the full episode here:

And here are three more recent popular episodes:

Tuning In

Ask Pastor John is a daily podcast series of 3–8 minute conversations released each weekday at 10:30am (EST) through the DG Facebook and Twitter feeds. You can tune in to the new episodes through the free Ask Pastor John mobile app for iPhone and Android. We’re currently hosting all the recordings on SoundCloud, a website making it easy to listen to several of the podcasts in one sitting. They’re also archived on the DG website and syndicated in iTunes.

We want to hear from you. To submit a question to Pastor John please include your first name, hometown, and question in an email to AskPastorJohn AT desiringGod DOT org.

Thanks for listening to the podcasts. We appreciate your engagement and interest.

Perhaps the only thing harder for prideful humans than humbly wielding power is humbly yielding power.

And the most beautiful Old Testament example of this is the way Jonathan yielded Israel’s throne to David. But as we see in 1 Samuel 23:15–18, he did far more than just yield.

Abinadab had watched his fugitive younger brother receive Jonathan like royalty. Such an embrace. Such intimate talk. Such weeping in farewell. What had David divulged to the enemy’s son?

He stepped beside David at the cave’s entrance and they watched Jonathan depart — returning to serve beside his father whose homicidal paranoia was forcing them to run like foxes and live like badgers.

“David, you won’t like my asking, but I need to. Is it wise just letting him go back to Saul?”

“My life is never safer than when it’s in his keeping.”

Abinadab shifted uneasily. “I know you love him. You’re very loyal. Very trusting. It’s one of your great qualities. I just hope your loyalty isn’t naïve here.”

David said nothing, his eyes still fixed on Jonathan.

Abinidab continued, “Brother, these are treacherous days. You barely escaped Doeg’s loose tongue. And those cowards of Keilah would have offered you as a peace offering to Saul despite the fact that you had just saved their necks from the Philistines. We need clear thinking here. Jonathan is next in line to be king. You’ve been friends. But the fact is, you’re now his one rival to the throne. Isn’t it possible that the blood of royal power may be thicker for Jonathan than the water of your friendship?”

Jonathan’s silhouette melded into the dusky shadows of the Horesh hills. David wiped his eyes and turned back into the cave. “You don’t know him, Abinadab. I’ll forgive this offense to his honor. We’re no more in danger than if that was our father walking away. But it’s not Jonathan’s affection for me that I trust. It’s his faith.”

Abinadab followed David. “Well, I hope I’m wrong, I really do. But Jonathan’s coming out here makes no sense to me if it’s not to spy you out. If he wanted to protect you he should never have come at all! What if he was followed?”

“Nobody’s more skillful at traceless trekking than Jonathan.”

“Maybe. But why would he come just for a friendly visit? Think of the risk. If his father finds out that he’s been here and didn’t report it, his life won’t be worth a pigeon’s. The king has nearly murdered him twice already! If he came here for love then he risked his life and all of ours. Why?”

“To strengthen my hand in God, Abinadab. Because he knows me. He knows how discouraged I can get.” David looked down and smiled. “God sent him because he knows how dark it’s been for me. I know what God has promised me. But with barely a step between me and death, it’s like I forget.”

David sat down on the rock near his gear and pulled some parchment from his satchel. “I’ve been working on this psalm. Let me read you the first lines:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?
O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer,
And by night, but I find no rest. (Psalm 22:1–2)

“Today,” David paused, clenching back sobs. “Today Jonathan risked his life to help me rest—to remind me that God is not far at all. What he said to me was, ‘Do not fear, for the hand of Saul my father shall not find you. You shall be king over Israel,’” David paused again as tears flowed freely, “‘and I shall be next to you. Saul my father also knows this.’

“Jonathan believes God, Abinadab. It’s his faith I trust. Jonathan loves God more than he loves power. And more than he loves me. He loves me because he loves God. That makes him the safest man in the world to me. He has no equal.” David hung his head. “I only hope he survives his father’s insane faithlessness. I so desperately want him next to me.”

David had a very difficult calling: to wield the power of Israel’s kingship with God-dependent humility.

Jonathan’s calling may have been more difficult: to yield the power of Israel’s kingship with God-dependent humility.

But Jonathan didn’t just yield to David. He loved David (1 Samuel 18:1), empowered David (1 Samuel 18:4), protected and advocated for David (1 Samuel 20). And when David’s faith-hand was losing its grip, he sought him out and “strengthened his hand” by reminding him of God’s promises (1 Samuel 23:17). He could have only done this if he trusted in the Lord with all his heart (Proverbs 3:5).

Like Jonathan, God wants us to seek first the kingdom (Matthew 6:33), not our prominence in it. When we trust God enough to yield our prominence (or expected prominence) to someone else for God’s purposes it’s a sign and wonder. And when we go beyond that to doing everything in our power to help them succeed — nothing else quite images the Philippians 2:5–11 glory of Jesus.

Jonathan did not consider the throne a thing to be grasped, but he made himself nothing for God’s sake and became a Christ-like servant. Let us also “have this mind” (Philippians 2:5).

This story is from 1 Samuel 16:8; 1 Samuel 22:9–19; 1 Samuel 23:1–14; 1 Samuel 14:24–46, 20:30–34; and 1 Samuel 20:3.

How do you pursue joy in Jesus? I mean what does it really look like — like today? How about when things are crazy at work or tense at home? If God made us to enjoy him, we have something infinitely valuable at our fingertips at any given moment. But how do we tap into it?

In this two-and-a-half-minute video, Lecrae Moore talks about his joy in Jesus — where he finds it and how it works itself out in every arena of his life. For him, fighting depression and discouragement is about spending lots and lots of intentional time with Jesus. As in every other relationship, Lecrae says, “quantity brings about quality,” because eventually we will see Christ more clearly.

Related resources:

• God Is Most Glorified In Us When We Are Most Satisfied In Him

• Where Does Joy Come From? (Seven Sources of Joy)

• Lecrae Raps the Gospel in One Minute

ST. PAUL, MN — Jeff Ansorge is a trim 40-year-old with buzzed hair and sideburns that are mostly silver and thick eyebrows that are mostly black. He’s a quiet, t-shirted Midwestern guy who can be found on any weekday hard at work in the Salvation Army soup kitchen in northeast St. Paul, Minnesota.

Every weekday morning, Jeff fills an echoing, cinder-block gymnasium with folding chairs and utility tables as he runs the lunch preparations in the kitchen off to the side. Before the day is done, he (and a volunteer or two) will serve between 140 and 180 lunches to a single-file line of the poorest residents in the community.

After twelve months, Jeff’s work is becoming routine. Managing the menu, ordering food, unloading pallets of food, coordinating his volunteers — all part of his daily juggle of set up, serving, cleaning, wiping down tables, stacking chairs, cleaning the kitchen, and taking out the trash when the lunch session is over.

It’s a daily routine Jeff enjoys, which is remarkable for a man who was, until recently, one of the highest paid chefs in the Twin Cities.

The Culinary Spark

Jeff was born in rural Minnesota and raised in rural Wisconsin by a devout Roman Catholic family. For much of his boyhood he served six days a week in his church and dreamed of becoming a priest.

Raised on a steady diet of Midwestern casseroles, his culinary interests were first triggered by a family trip to Disney World where he encountered a five-course French meal. The experience was so profound it sparked in him an inextinguishable new desire for the world of culinary art. Jeff began cooking. He cooked for the family, he cooked in home economics class in high school, and he watched the cooks in the local restaurant business while working as a busboy and dishwasher.

In high school Jeff entered and won a statewide recipe contest sponsored by one of the top culinary schools in America — Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island. His recipe (a take on ocean perch), earned him a trip to compete in the national competition at Johnson & Wales. He won scholarships and decided to attend the school, 1,200 miles away from home.

Jeff excelled in college, and his success fueled his passion for cooking. The freedom away from home was liberating, and it opened him to all the blessings and all the temptations of college life. After his first year, Jeff fell into vices that would plague him until his early 30s — drunkenness, addictions, and drugs.

Despite his vices, Jeff continued to excel in his culinary career path. In part, he supported himself through four years of college by working, first at a local Subway near campus, then later by teaching at the school. After college he became a prep cook with The Capital Grille, an upscale steakhouse on the rise in Providence. The timing was perfect. As Jeff worked up the ranks to sous-chef the company began expanding to its over forty locations around the country. Jeff was tasked to open new restaurants.

To the Breaking Point

Jeff returned to the Midwest in 1997 when he opened The Capital Grille in downtown Minneapolis, a five-star, New York style chophouse and sophisticated men’s club, with an ambiance of mahogany, leather, chandeliers, and thousands of wine bottles.

It was there he met his wife, a hostess. They were married in 2002 and had their first child in 2005.

The restaurant life was exciting, but by the time he became a father in 2005, Jeff was burned out from the demanding schedule of an executive chef. He left the kitchen, though not for long. After leaving The Capital Grille he eventually made his way back to the kitchen at a jazz club steakhouse in downtown Minneapolis. But when the Capital Grille lost their head chef, they enticed him back with six-digits’ worth of salary, bonuses, and stocks.

He made the move, but as the months and years passed, a deep void in his life became increasingly visible to his wife and his family. He was depressed, and began to rely on antidepressants. He no longer smoked pot or cigarettes after his first child was born in 2005, but he drank sporadically at night after work. His marriage grew increasingly unstable, and though he tried to fill the void in his life with work, money, alcohol, and pornography, the emptiness grew. A breaking point was near.

The Crash — And Awakening

Late in 2010, Jeff’s life really crumbled.

“I crashed with my depression. I wanted a divorce. In the fall of 2010 two of my brother-in-laws confronted me. ‘You cannot do this,’ they said. They came at me from a biblical standpoint. They would confront me with Scripture over the phone, then I would hang up and my wife and I would laugh and talk about how crazy they were.

“One day they traveled from Iowa and Milwaukee, sat me down in my kitchen, and asked me about basic Christian truths: Do I believe in Jesus? Do I believe that God created the world and Adam and Eve? And I said, yes, absolutely. They both told me about their lives and explained spiritual warfare we face in this world. The next morning in my car I turned on the AM radio station and heard a preacher say word for word the same thing my brother-in-law said the night before. That’s when it happened — God opened my eyes.”

Jeff always thought of himself as religious, but he didn’t talk about it. Faith wasn’t a hang-up when he married his wife (an agnostic).

But now he had experienced the regenerating grace of God in his life. Never a reader, Jeff got a copy of the Bible and read the New Testament for the first time. He read it in ten days. His new zeal was becoming obvious, but his newborn life only drove a wedge deeper into his marriage. One month later, his wife asked him to move out, filed divorce papers, and ended their nine-year marriage.

Finding Salvation Army

As the months passed in his new life in Christ, Jeff found himself less and less interested in maintaining the lifestyle at The Capital Grille. The company had grown into a mammoth corporation and Jeff was ready to move on, permanently.

Having experienced God’s grace, Jeff turned to the non-profit food industry where he could integrate his love of food and his burgeoning desire to share the gospel. He submitted his résumé to the Salvation Army and several other non-profit organizations. After a few long months of silence and waiting, he was contacted, interviewed, and hired.

Jeff left a restaurant that averages a bill of $80 per person to serve lunches at a cost of $0.63. A lot of people thought he was crazy to make the move. But even making $100,000 a year, Jeff didn’t own his house or cars — he couldn’t escape his debts. When he left The Capital Grille, he decided to sell off his employee stocks to pay off his cars and his house and all his debts.

“Now I make less than 40% of what I once did. I’m on the clock. I get paid by the hour. But I’m out of debt. I own my house and cars. It was worth it.”

The Work

So what’s an average day for Jeff now?

He runs the hot lunch program, and during the school year he cooks for an at-risk youth program (snack and dinner). “An average day for me includes menu planning, ordering food, sorting food donations, putting bills into spreadsheets, cooking, organizing and managing volunteers and community service workers, and then offering a biblical devotion and meals to the clients who come through. I help with Friday food giveaways; we move 3,000–5,000 pounds of food for people to have with them over the weekend. I mop, I clean, I set up tables, I set up chairs, I take out the garbage. I’m the only paid person here.”

Nothing is below his pay grade — sometimes, when volunteers don’t show, he pulls off lunches by himself.

The Questions

Jeff’s dramatic transition from a five-star kitchen to a Salvation Army gym raises two questions.

First, why not remain in the high-end food industry and be a witness for Christ there? “In the restaurant industry I cannot go out in the dining room, stand there and preach the gospel to everyone,” he said. “But now I can. I feel better utilized among people who are homeless or have low incomes, and feel I have a greater good to offer here.”

But there’s a second question. Given his Roman Catholic background, is all this non-profit work his penance to make up for a previous life he regrets?

“Not at all,” he says without hesitation. “That never entered my mind. When I was a kid and I would do something wrong, I would confess, and the priest would assign seven ‘Hail Marys,’ or whatever. I know what penance is, but this is not penance. I’m doing this because I was reborn, because something tangible happened inside of me because of the gospel, something that I can define and feel and pinpoint the time and events in my life surrounding it.”

The joy on his face proved the point.

This soup-kitchen cook serves out of a profound identity transformation. “My identity was determined by my job: by my status, the money I was making, and the house and cars I could buy. Now, my identity is in Christ: I am a follower of Christ, a child of God. My identity is now someone who seeks to help people and to spread the gospel. I’m doing what I love, for people I love, for the person I love — Jesus Christ.”

More Than Food

After a year, Jeff is starting to see a return on investment in the lives he serves. “I’ve seen so many people come through the door that are hard. When I first got here there was one guy in particular, I would ask his name and he would tell me, ‘I just came here for a meal, that’s all.’ And that was it. He ate and left. Months later now this same guy comes in and we chat and engage in conversation. I have seen this tangible life change, knowing it happened by being a reflection of Jesus.”

Jeff has been changed this year, too. “I came from working in restaurants all my life. Very driven. High speed. All about organization, and making things as streamlined and efficient as possible. It took me six or seven months to wind down from that. When I got here I was all about streamlining, efficiency, changing things, making it good — so focused on the food. At the same time I was leading the devotional. But over time God has opened my eyes to see the food is secondary.”

Avoiding the Spotlight

Except for the man who took his application and hired him, Jeff’s résumé was a secret when he started at the Salvation Army (his preference). But his story soon got out, spread, and was made public when a local television station featured him. His volunteers now call him “Chef Jeff.”

After his first year, he is happy, and says the move to The Salvation Army was one of his best life decisions.

It’s a story filled with sin and grace, and it’s a story Jeff is willing to share, if you ask him. But he’s not eager to share his private or public story. “I’d rather be tucked away,” he says in his tucked-away office. He says he looks forward to a day when the reporters and the spotlight leave him alone, when he is no longer given stewardship and community awards, when he appears on no more Salvation Army posters, or in magazine articles, or in blog posts, when he can quietly continue the mission he has taken up to the poor who show up every day to his gym-turned-dining room, to fill their hungry stomachs with food that perishes, and — more importantly — to offer hungry souls the all-satisfying bread of Jesus Christ that endures for all eternity (John 6:27, 35).

More biographical profiles from Tony Reinke:

• Dying Well: One Woman’s Extraordinary Story
• Light for a Dark World: The Story of Tope Koleoso
• Jack’s Typewriter

It may be the most important doctrine you’ve never heard of.

So says Kevin DeYoung about the reality of “union with Christ” — and sadly it seems he’s right.

But hopefully you aren’t among that number — and have not just heard about the doctrine, but begun to taste the practical fruit of this wide and wonderful reality. As Sinclair Ferguson says about union with Christ, “Of all the doctrines surrounding the Christian life this, one of the profoundest, is also one of the most practical in its effects.”

Even though union with Christ too often has been under-emphasized, more and more pastors and laymen are talking in recent years about union with Christ. And we want to add kindling to that fire.

What Is Union Anyway?

Simply put, union with Christ is the theological term for the believer’s being joined to Jesus by the Holy Spirit through faith. In fulfillment of God’s ancient promise, I will be your God, and you will be my people, union with Christ is, according to John Frame, “the most general way of characterizing Jesus’s work of salvation.” The way in which all that Jesus accomplished for us gets applied to us is through our being connected to Jesus, our being “in” him.

Our union with Jesus by faith is how the objective accomplishments of his life, death, and resurrection two millennia ago come to be subjectively applied to other humans, whether Peter, Paul, Mary, Augustine, Luther, Spurgeon, or us who believe in the 21st century.

A Pastors Conference Dream Come True

Two voices who have helped get this vital doctrine back on the radar, and into its proper place, are Sinclair Ferguson and Michael Horton. We dreamed that maybe they’d help us explore the glories of this doctrine at our upcoming Desiring God 2014 Conference for Pastors, and they both agreed. So Monday to Wednesday, February 3–5, 2014, Ferguson and Horton will join forces with John Piper under the banner,

The Pastor, the Vine, and the Branches: The Remarkable Reality of Union with Christ

We’d love to have you mark your calendar, make arrangements, and join us in Minneapolis in February. Ferguson, Horton, and Piper each will give two plenary messages on union with Christ — Ferguson focusing on exposition, Horton honing in on the theological and historical, and Piper preaching through John 15 and providing a biographical address on missionary Hudson Taylor.

A “early bird” registration rate is available for those who get in early, by Monday, November 11.

Also, Paul Tripp will be joining us for two pre-conference sessions on making the gospel practical in pastoral ministry, along with four afternoon seminar options. Here’s the full schedule, with the speakers and message titles.

Monday, February 3

1:00 – 1:45 PM Pre-Conference

• Paul Tripp, Preaching the Gospel to Yourself

2:00 – 2:45 PM Pre-Conference

• Paul Tripp, Living the Gospel That You Preach

3:00 – 3:45 PM Seminars

• Jared Wilson, The Promise in Pastoral Weakness

• Kempton Turner, The Pastor’s Purity and Pleasure

• Rick Gamache, Pastoring Your Wife and Kids

• David Mathis & Jonathan Parnell, How to Stay Christian in Seminary — And Any Season of Waiting

7:00 – 8:30 PM
John Piper, Glorifying God by Bearing Fruit in Union With Christ (John 15:1–11)

Tuesday, February 4

8:30 – 10:00 AM
Sinclair Ferguson, Union with Christ: Mind-Renewing Foundations

10:30 – 11:30 AM
Michael Horton, Calvin on Union with Christ

1:45 – 3:00 PM
Sinclair Ferguson, Union with Christ: Life-Transforming Implications

7:00 – 8:30 PM
Michael Horton, Union With Christ and the Communion of Saints

Wednesday, February 5

8:30 – 10:15 AM
John Piper, The Ministry of Hudson Taylor As Life in Christ

10:45 – 11:45 AM
Speaker Panel, Questions & Answers with Horton, Ferguson, and Piper

For more on union with Christ, especially as it relates to sanctification, see the introduction to Acting the Miracle: God’s Work and Ours in the Miracle of Sanctification and John Piper’s post “The Stupendous Reality of Union with Christ”. For more information on the conference — or to take advantage of the “early bird” rate by Monday, November 11 — see the event page.

My dearest Grubnat,

I am glad to see you are finally learning to be subtler in manipulating your human. As I had warned you, I was concerned that your boisterous assault on the unborn vermin with the rare chromosomal makeup (the “disabled,” as the other vermin call them) was going to expose all our plans to destroy them.

So I congratulate you on the recent article in The New York Times, “Breakthroughs in Prenatal Screening.” I can see your skills developing. We must continue on this path as it does two important things for us: 1) it further blinds the humans to our real schemes; and 2) it rids us of having to deal with those foul, weak, “special” children that the Enemy calls “indispensable.” We mustn’t lose our grip here.

Because of this article, and unlike my last letters to you, I actually have a few things to commend — things to see you repeat.

No Names, No Shame

Now, I wouldn’t have opened the article exactly the way you did (more on that in my comments about how you can improve), but I must admit I appreciate how you dehumanized the mother and the child in your opening paragraphs.

Refusing to mention the name of the child was excellent! Names are bad for our cause. It makes the humans actually begin to imagine them as “children” rather than the “mere tissue” we want them to think those little humans are. Let them only think the child is “Down syndrome,” and never Michael or Elizabeth.

Silence of the Moms

Also, good job on not quoting the mother at all about how she feels today about her child. Those puny humans, left with all their preconceived notions and prejudices, already do well at creating frightening alternative realities for that mother. They talk about how sad she was, how horrible her life was, how much better it would have been if that child had never been born. In fact, I am a little jealous at how quickly they’ve been trained to distort reality.

The humans who have been through the distortion tutelage usually aren’t even afraid of the right things! When a parent talks about both the hardship and the “blessing” of raising that child (yes, the Enemy often makes good come to the family through this vermin), a little whiff of reality sets in. And when that happens it becomes harder for us to kill the next one. So keep bleaching from their minds the idea of these babies being real persons.

The Responsibility of Fatality

Another thing: the clean, clinical description of the prenatal tests nicely ignored any discussion about how much the culture loathes these disabled children. How laughable for them to think that “tests” are neutral in a world like theirs!

The doctors and so-called ethicists are the best among them for our cause. Keep working on the medical professionals to believe that termination is a responsible choice, especially when you know the mother doesn’t have anyone around her to support the birth of her child.

A Well-Informed Genocide

And another thing: The following sentence was perhaps your best: “When prenatal testing reveals that a fetus has a serious birth defect, some women may consider ending their pregnancies.” Hilarious! Yes, yes, yes! Let the mothers think they are just making an “informed, personal choice” rather than realize that they’re part of our culturally orchestrated attack on children who have the extra chromosome. The Holocaust was fun, but this is even more satisfying. They actually think their individual choices don’t accumulate into genocide.

Now enough with the commendations! Here are a few things you neglected.

No Baby Pictures

Why in the world did you allow them to have drawings of babies in the graphic above the article? Yes, some humans are so calloused that they don’t care whether it is a baby or not. But most don’t like to think too much about it. Don’t give them any evidence that the little creatures they are destroying are actually human just like them. Don’t make this mistake again. Test tubes or computer code or something like that are far better. Keep it clean and scientific.

Bury Abortion

As much as I appreciated your opening the article with the story about the friend with the disabled child, you overdid it. The headline was about prenatal screening and you immediately made the story about abortion. The humans are stupid but even they can see an agenda this obvious. Next time bury the abortion bit later in the story so that the test results always end with a “compassionate” termination.

Avoid Real Sufferers

Never suggest that they talk to parents who are raising children with disabilities. For some unknown reason to me, when they talk to people who have experienced real suffering rather than imagined suffering, they get encouraged and emboldened. You know how our Enemy works in suffering.

Killing Can Be a Good Thing

In the future, only present all the hardship and expense and loneliness and how awful their lives will be, always couching it in terms of how horrible their baby’s life will be. They feel better, and their hearts get just a little harder, when they rationalize that killing their baby was a good thing. That’s the reason that if we can convince a woman to have an abortion she will likely have more.

Make these corrections and I’m sure your next piece will be even better. And I know The New York Times will be happy to print it.

Content with your work, for now,

Wormwood

Recent posts from John Knight:

• Protect the Children from Chemical Weapons

• How to Serve Families with Disability

• Singing to Silence the Enemy

Pornography is a problem.

Porn is like a narcotic, it hijacks the brain, it redefines human sexuality, and in the meantime ruins lives, destroys families, and destabilizes ministries. And honestly it’s a problem that makes me tired — tired of the devastation Satan is causing to children, women, families, pastors, churches, and the world with this tragic evil.

Porn became a problem for me when I was only six, and by the grace of God that problem ended when Jesus saved me at age seventeen. But I know it rarely happens so cleanly. It is still a temptation, yes; temptation abounds living in the city I do, and with the heart I have, but grace abounds all the more in Jesus Christ.

Friends, I hate porn. And here’s why.

I hate porn because it is a perversion of what God created in man and woman.

I hate porn because it exploits women made in the image of God into an image made for a man’s lust.

I hate porn because it objectifies women into a consumable product instead of a glorious image-bearing creature of God.

I hate porn because I love women — in particular my wife and three daughters.

I hate porn because it takes the soul satisfying experience of sex with a covenantally-committed spouse and turns it into a twisted soul shrinking experience of self-sex.

I hate porn because it turns sons and daughters of God into slaves of sex.

I hate porn because it turns potential missionaries into impotent Christians.

I hate porn because it destroys marriage, many before they even begin.

I hate porn because it extends adolescence and keeps men boys.

I hate porn because it lies to men about beauty and leads men to look for a porn star instead of a woman who fears the Lord.

I hate porn because it robs men and women of the full joy of obedience.

I hate porn because it fractures trust between a husband and wife.

I hate porn because it is a diabolical, satanic activity that is subtly leading thousands upon thousands to hell.

I hate porn because it leads to disqualified pastors and impotent churches. (Pastors, if you are addicted to porn, you are disqualified, and you are killing your church!)

I hate porn because I suspect it’s the most significant reason we are not planting more churches and sending more missionaries.

I hate porn because it disqualifies gospel preachers who could fill the empty church buildings in my city and so many others.

I hate porn because of the disappointment children have to go through when their dad tells them why they lost their job or opportunity to lead in the church.

I hate porn because it teaches a distorted view of sex to children before it can be explained by loving parents.

I hate porn because I am tired of sitting in my living room with sobbing, confused, devastated wives and broken, embarrassed, condemned men who got caught.

I hate porn because it leads to rape, molestation, and perversion that can devastate people for the rest of their lives.

I hate porn because it turns men inward and suffocates a man’s ambition to make God’s name hallowed.

I hate porn because it says sin, Satan, and the world are more satisfying than our Triune God and his grace.

I hate porn because I hate ungodly guilt and condemnation.

I hate porn for the fear it induces in the hearts of parents everywhere that their child could stumble upon a sight and get addicted.

But I love Jesus.

I love Jesus because he loves people with porn problems.

I love Jesus because he is powerful to free porn-enslaved hearts.

He who knew no porn addiction became porn addiction so the porn addict might become the righteousness of God in him.

He who had no sin became sin for you so that you may become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21).

In that one brilliant sentence, Paul puts an end to the porn problem.

Friend, you are no longer in Adam but in Jesus. Jesus became a substitute. It was as if he became the porn addict, by receiving the just penalty due for our perversion, and you became the righteous son or daughter of God with all its benefits.

Friend, in one act of Love and Justice, in the cross-work of Jesus, through faith in him, you are now clean, holy, accepted, forgiven and free. Let me say it again . . . free!

I love Jesus.

Recent, related posts:

• Pornography: The New Narcotic (John Piper)

• Hijacking Back Your Brain from Porn (John Piper)

• Porn, Pride, and Praise (Heath Lambert)

Last week I wrote about the physiological dimension of addiction to pornography. New brain research suggests it is as strong as addiction to cocaine and heroin because of its unique combination of stimulant and opiate. Pornography lays down real physiological paths in the brain. All sexual experience tends to migrate to these paths.

I concluded that none of this brain research takes God by surprise. He designed the interplay between the brain and the soul. Discoveries of the connections between physical and spiritual reality do not nullify either.

Don’t Be Part of Abolishing Man

So don’t let this new brain research make you think of yourself as mere flesh and chemicals. This is the great myth of the modern world — what C. S. Lewis called the abolition of man. This is the theory that human thought is nothing but movement in the brain. It is a theory developed to destroy itself.

Lewis saw the tentacles of materialism reaching into every sphere:

There will always be evidence, and every month fresh evidence, to show that religion is only psychological, justice only self-protection, politics only economics, love only lust, and thought itself only cerebral biochemistry. (“Transposition,” in The Weight of Glory, 114–115)

But Lewis saw that nobody really acts as though they believe this. They are playing a language game. He illustrates this with the relationship between thought and brains:

We are certain that, in this life at any rate, thought is intimately connected with the brain. The theory that thought therefore is merely a movement in the brain is, in my opinion, nonsense; for if so, that theory itself would be merely a movement, an event among atoms, which may have speed and direction but of which it would be meaningless to use the words “true” or ”false.” (“Transposition,” 103)

Lewis is not playing counter-games here. He is blood-earnest that the abolishers of man are refusing to see that they claim to make meaningful statements while destroying meaning.

Take the Mind-Body Connection by the Horns

Meaning is rooted in supra-material truth. You are not mere matter and energy. You are an embodied soul who will live forever in heaven or in hell, created in the image of God, unlike mere animals, and, as a Christian, bought with the blood of the Son of God, and indwelt by the very Spirit of God himself. These are stupendous realities — greater realities than endorphins and dopamine.

God wove together physical nerves and supra-physical spiritual affections — desire, fear, joy, anger, pity, admiration, trust, cherishing, love. Instead of letting this connection discourage you, take it by the horns and make it serve your holiness. This is what the Bible calls you to do.

Don’t think the Bible is silent on this all-important question of mind and body — thinking and brains, affections and chemicals. God made these connections between physical and supra-physical, and God has wisdom for living in them.

Consider these four hope-filled observations.

1. Deep Renewal, Including Your Brain

Brain research is an infant science, publishing its first baby steps. They have scarcely begun to even name the mysteries of how truth and beauty is mediated through language, and then enters the mind as thought, and then is transposed into corresponding chemical processes.

Therefore, we should take hold of this amazing connection and claim what the Bible claims: Beholding the glory of the Lord, we are being changed (2 Corinthians 3:18). Of course seeing nudes changes the brain. But why should we think that seeing the glory of Christ exerts a weaker change? If brain paths pervert our affections and our behavior, do not make the wild mistake of assuming sanctification can only make weaker paths.

Paul calls you to “be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new man, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Ephesians 4:23–24). Watch out, lest you assume that the renewal of “the spirit of the mind” leaves no trace in the paths of the brain. It does.

Paul says, “Put on the new man, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator” (Colossians 3:10). If the seeing of internet nakedness creates new paths in the brain, how much more the seeing of Christ — the spiritual sight of “the gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God” (2 Corinthians 4:4). We are not left to create new brains for ourselves: “we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:10). Do not be cowed by brain research. God made the brain and wrote the Book.

2. Bloody Christ, Bad Odors, and Bears

Moreover, we know from experience that we are not slaves of these powerful pornographic changes in our brains. I do not minimize them. Judging by the ongoing effects, even in my sixties, of my teenage tomfoolery, I have tasted the amazing staying power of old sinful patterns. But we are not horses or mules that can only be curbed with bit and bridle (Psalm 32:9).

You know this. If you were in the grip of great sexual desire for pornography, and Jesus himself stood before you in your room, blood splattered, hands trembling with pain, eyes brimming with love, breathing heavily like a dying man, you know — yes, you know — you would have power in that moment to not look at the pornography as Jesus stood there. You are not enslaved. The well-beaten neural paths in your brain would not win. They are not God. They do not have the last say.

Or just at the physical level, you know from experience that a mere smell — say of human feces, or rancid garbage, or your own armpit can knock the sexual drive right out of your groin. What does that mean? It means those neural paths are not final. They can be trumped. You are not a mere victim.

Or consider this. You are about to commit fornication in a tent in the woods. You never dreamed it would come to this, but now the tidal wave of desire has simply conquered you. Or has it? What if, in the moment of hottest passion, before entry, you heard the sound of a grizzly bear, and saw silhouetted on the tent his mammoth size, would you be the slave of lust? Or would not fear utterly triumph over those chemicals?

Beware of thinking you are a victim of the euphoric effect of dopamine and endorphins. You are not. God has ways of revealing his bloody Christ, and staggering you with odors and bears to rescue you for himself. He will stoop to this for love’s sake.

3. Satan, Sex, and Chemicals

Supra-chemical emotions — spiritual affections — are transposed into corresponding physical responses in the brain. That means you can fight physical fire with spiritual fire. And it works the other way as well. God ordains that we fight for spiritual fruit by wielding physiological weapons with spiritual hands.

Have you ever considered the stunning implications of Paul’s Satan-defeating sexual counsel in 1 Corinthians 7:5? Be careful, single people. You are likely to jump to the conclusion that this is either irrelevant for you, or bad news. It’s not. Paul says to husbands and wives,

Do not deprive one another [of sexual relations], except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.

This implies that Paul intends for Christian couples to fight against the supernatural power of Satan by having sufficiently frequent sexual relations. To put the point physiologically: There are brain chemicals that increase desire for sex as the length of abstinence increases. The power of those chemicals decreases after orgasm. Therefore, Paul says, make use of that physiological reality in marriage to reduce your vulnerability to Satan’s temptation to adultery and pornography.

Of course, this is not the only or the main weapon in our arsenal. But it is one. And it illustrates the validity of using physiological weapons against physiological foes. Single people may rightly say, I don’t have that particular marriage weapon in my arsenal. That’s right. And I admire you for saying it. But embrace the principle as it applies to you. There are physiological realities that you know affect your vulnerability to temptation. Use them to make war.

4. The Holy Spirit, Sleep, and Self-Control

But is that spiritual? Isn’t self-control a “fruit of the Holy Spirit,” rather than a fruit of frequent sexual relations?

It is a fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:23), but not “rather than” a fruit of other forces. The Spirit’s way of producing his fruit often includes very natural means. For example, another fruit of the Spirit is patience (Galatians 5:22). But who of us would deny that our patience rises and falls with how much sleep we get? Love, Paul says, is “patient . . . and not easily irritated” (1 Corinthians 13:4–5). But we are more easily irritated, and less patient, when we have not gotten the rest we need.

What I infer from this is that one of the many weapons in the arsenal of the Holy Spirit is sleep. He humbles us to realize we are not God and that we need to be as helpless as a baby seven or eight hours a day, in order to be the loving, patient people he calls us to be.

Similarly with sexual self-control. The Holy Spirit teaches us from Scripture, and from experience, and from each other, how our bodies work. He means for us to lean on his power as we use the physiological counter-weapons he gives us.

Finding True Ecstasy

Brain research is right: Our brains are deeply shaped by what we see. And the more we see, the more well-beaten and controlling those paths become. But we are not their victims. These physiological powers are not ultimate. God is ultimate. And he has given us spiritual weapons just as physiologically powerful as pornography. He too means to be seen — often and deeply (2 Corinthians 3:18; 4:4).

Moreover the spiritual powers of his word and Spirit have the right to conscript physiological forces into their service. And in the end, God can hijack back the very paths of pornography and transpose the scintillations of those very paths into the ecstasies of knowing Christ.

Recent posts from John Piper:

• Pornography: The New Narcotic

• How to Be Interesting and Unhelpful

• Does “Mere Christianity” Mean Eliminate Denominations?

Our message is not you can do it.

It’s not you’re good enough, smart enough, and people like you.

What we preach is that you are a glorious creature gone tragically bad, that you have rebelled against the God who made you, but that he did the most difficult thing imaginable to win you back and lavish you with his eternal goodness.

It is wondrously good news. But unavoidable is the offense, that insulting supposition, that bad news that sets up the good. Did you catch it? You’ve gone tragically bad. You’re a foolhardy rebel against the most powerful person in the universe. There’s nothing you can do to save yourself, earn God’s favor, or get yourself out of the cosmic pit you’re in — the pit you dug and can’t climb out of.

The offense is that the magnitude of God’s solution — the slaughter of his own Son — shows the magnitude of our wickedness and frailty and utter inability. Yes, the gospel says you’re more loved than you ever could have dreamed, but as Jack Miller and Tim Keller have noted, at the same time it says you’re more sinful than you ever imagined. And that’s repugnant to the natural palate.

If you’ve never tasted the cross as offensive, you’ve missed something essential.

Why the Cross Offends

Talking about the cross as an “offense” comes from Galatians 5:11: “If I, brothers, still preach circumcision, why am I still being persecuted? In that case the offense of the cross has been removed.” Why it is that the cross would be seen as an offense? What’s offensive about the crucifixion?

The cross declares how dire is our condition apart from Jesus. It announces how deep the sin goes, how profound the rebellion is, how impossible is our plight apart from Help from the outside. There’s nothing we can do, no effort we can exert, no law we can follow.

The message of Christ crucified says you’re an absolute failure in relation to what’s most important. The horror of killing the Son of God points to the horror of our condition. The badness of Good Friday is a tribute to the badness in us.

The cross embodies some of the most offensive things possible you could say about someone in relation to God and eternity. This gruesome death Jesus died, you earned it. The hell Jesus endured, you deserved it, forever. The shame he underwent, the scorn, the disrespect, the hurt — all these are as suitable to us sinners as they’re unsuitable to the sinless one.

God’s Offensive Plan

And it’s not that it just turned out this way, but God planned it. He designed the offense. Seven hundred years before Jesus, the prophet Isaiah called it — he will be “a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense” (Isaiah 8:14). And such he was, and continues to be. Both Peter and Paul pick up on the theme (Romans 9:32–33; 1 Peter 2:7–8).

Jesus himself, in John 6, challenges his disciples with the offense. “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” (John 6:44). You can’t do it. You’re not good enough or smart enough. And perhaps most offensive of all: You are lifeless. “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53).

The offense is not mainly his mention of eating flesh and drinking blood, but the accusation of deep depravity and spiritual inability. As the crowds retreat at his forthrightness, Jesus asks his disciples, “Do you take offense at this?” (John 6:61). More unnerving than taking his plainly figurative language in a literal sense is hearing that you are powerless and lifeless where it matters most. This is as offensive as it gets.

Remember the Right Offense

Typically we get antsy about speaking the gospel to someone who doesn’t already believe. Some of our fear, of course, is unwarranted. But some of it is for good reason. In communicating the gospel, one of the essential things we must at least imply, if not make explicit, is the most offensive truth possible: you are powerless precisely where it matters most. You are dead to what truly is life.

Don’t take it too far. We don’t gloat in giving offense. We labor to remove every possible barrier. May the offense not be our personality or carelessness or quirkiness or arrogance. Like Paul, let’s “endure anything rather than put an obstacle in the way of the gospel of Christ” (1 Corinthians 9:12; 2 Corinthians 6:3). Let’s strain to “become all things to all people, that by all means [we] might save some” (1 Corinthians 9:22). Let’s do everything in our power to “give no offense to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God” (1 Corinthians 10:32).

But this one offense — the offense of the cross — we cannot remove. We dare not.

More from Sent:

• Let’s Revise the Popular Phrase “In, but Not of”

• Hospitality and the Great Commission

• Sent into the Harvest: Halloween on Mission

Psalm 143:8 may capture it best:

Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love,
for in you I trust.
Make me know the way I should go,
for to you I lift up my soul.

Two things make up everyone’s everyday: receptivity and productivity. We are creatures who constantly take in and put out. We absorb and we exude.

The question is what will it be?

The psalmist tells us the best way to start.

The Battle Is On

David writes as a man in turmoil. The enemy has pursued his soul (Psalm 143:3). His spirit is blacking out. His heart is appalled (Psalm 143:4). Don’t picture him waking up mid-morning at a cozy B&B. It’s more like a battle, and his enemy is in motion.

It’s more like how it is most days for us, even though the warfare against us is largely unseen. Our alarm clock goes off, and the prince of the air never hits his snooze. We wake up in a warzone.

Sometimes that may mean that we, by faith, cherish some extra time under the covers and stick it to our enemy. The decisive battle has been won, after all. Our blood was spilt for victory when our sins were nailed through Jesus’s hands. When he died, we died. When he conquered death, we conquered with him, and every force set against us was exposed to open shame. The hope of our eternal souls is not dependent upon how quickly we spring out of bed.

A Prayer of Our Own

But we will get up, and whenever we do, the scheming principalities are soaring. Circumstances breathe down our necks. Stress starts pounding on our doors. We gear up for 17 straight hours of receptivity and productivity.

This is where David’s prayer in Psalm 143:8 helps. He gets to the heart of the matter. If we are stepping into absorbing and exuding, first things first, let us soak in God’s truth and then submit all our doing to his guidance. The best way to start the day, everyday, is with the prayer, in short: let me hear and lead me on.

Let Me Hear . . .

Let us first hear of God’s steadfast love and steady our thoughts on this anchor: God shows his love for me in that while I was still a sinner, Christ died for me (Romans 5:8). For my sake, God made his sinless Son to be sin so that in him I might become his righteousness (2 Corinthians 5:21). Christ redeemed me from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for me (Galatians 3:13). Let us receive his words: You did not choose me, but I chose you. I have redeemed you. I have called you by name. You are mine (John 15:16; Isaiah 43:1).

Rest firmly in the gospel of his grace — that he loves you, that he has his grip on you, that he is never letting you go (John 10:28). Let us hear this because it’s in God we trust, not the hottest news story, nor the latest best-selling book, nor the lies whispered to us by our enemy. God tells us what really is. God is the one we believe.

Lead Me On . . .

And then lead us on. Where do we go? What do we do? There are thousands of tributaries just around the bend. This prayer is simply: God, make us know the way.

We all are called to productivity, meaning that we all will say things and do things and decide things. Praying this second piece of Psalm 143:8 starts the day by demolishing the idea that we have it all figured out. God must give us the wisdom we lack. He must lead us by his sovereign hand. He must because we renounce the ruinous attempt to control our own world. He is our God. This is his world. We lift up our souls to him.

This prayer is hope of the deepest kind, first elating us by the wonder of God’s love at Calvary and then humbling us by the truth that we never stop needing him. There is his definitive, rock-solid demonstration of covenant love and unfailing faithfulness. And then there is his nearness now, his grace today and guidance tomorrow.

Let me hear and lead me on is the best way to start the day.

Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love,
for in you I trust.
Make me know the way I should go,
for to you I lift up my soul.

Recent posts from Jonathan Parnell:

• Does Success Start on Sunday?

• It’s Time to Celebrate

• Don’t Go to Church to Give

At bottom, the difference between faith in God and all other alternatives is a choice: to believe or not to believe. But this is no blind leap of faith.

Faith is not irrational.

Faith is not insanity.

Faith is not stepping into the void.

Faith is sanity.

Faith is choosing to see what is actually there.

Faith is the choice to embrace life, the world, God.

Certainly, faith is not exhaustive knowledge or complete understanding. Faith believes certain things that are unseen. But we do not believe the unseen things based on nothing. Faith is not a shot in the dark. Faith is not a good guess.

Faith sees the stars and gapes in wonder. Faith sees a little baby in her mother’s arms and blinks back tears of astonishment. Faith sees even evil, mind-numbing atrocities and aches with revulsion. But these realities do not add up to nothing. They are parts of a story, lines in a poem, and the punch line is God, a good and loving Creator, and a world bracing with beauty, slashed and cracked with evil and sin.

That’s not a stretch. That’s right there in your face, every day.

Suppression Insanity

That means that the choice to not believe, the choice to turn away from God is the suppression of these truths (Romans 1:18). In other words, it is not a rational decision. It is a form of insanity.

But to say that refusing to believe in God is insanity is not the same thing as saying it is not understandable. It is an understandable mistake. It’s understandable because it’s the kind of decision that requires telling the truth. And truth telling has a way of shining light into the corners of peoples’ lives that is highly uncomfortable. This is why our rejection of the light is often multilayered. People build complex psychological and emotional barriers to the truth. They are still culpable. They are still responsible, but it’s understandable because there’s sin down in those corners. It’s dark down there.

The Creator

To admit that the world has a Creator is to admit that this world has a reason, a purpose. To admit that there is a Designer is to admit that there is a moral order, a functional order, a right and a wrong, a better and worse way to live life. To admit that this world was created is to admit that you have a responsibility for how you have treated others, how you have lived. And the standard for judging your actions is not you. It’s outside of you. And everybody knows instinctively that they have fallen short of the glory they were made for.

So for many, it’s simply unthinkable to believe in God, to believe in a Creator. It’s unthinkable because that would demand thinking certain thoughts that might lead to other conclusions that would eventually imply guilt and responsibility for that guilt. It’s easier to maintain a vague guilt, a vague notion of nobody’s-perfect, and all against the infinite void of evolutionary chaos, which keeps everything sufficiently blurred — we can’t be certain who’s really at fault, so don’t worry about it too much.

As it turns out there’s a pretty sizable army of these relativistic warriors at the moment. The universities are filled with English and Philosophy professors that function as the drill sergeants for this host of guilt-soothers. And the science labs serve up the mysteries, the sacraments of unbelief, insisting that students practice scientific methodologies without actually pressing them into the corners. Pretend the world is ordered. Pretend that logic is meaningful. Pretend that observable phenomena communicate the grace of certainty.

But not too much.

Don’t Ask

Don’t ask questions about where it all came from. Don’t ask about beauty. Pretend that the little baby in its mother’s womb is just a mass of protoplasm. It could be a tumor. And if you feel that you are a woman trapped inside a man’s body, that’s okay too. No matter that the only scientifically observable phenomenon is the fact that you’re a sexual predator. We will pass laws, and soon you will be able to use whatever locker room you like.

This is insanity, and that’s why faith has the upper hand. Faith is honest about the world. Choosing to believe the latest version of your pagan-approved science textbook, choosing to believe the high priests of atheism, choosing to believe in vague evolutionary relativism is choosing not to see, choosing not to think, choosing to ignore what is right there in front of everyone.

We don’t know which chapter of the story we’re in. We may have another fifty or two hundred years of this kind of cultural insanity. But be assured, we are not playing on equal footing. It’s not like we all squint into the void, and some of us believe in God and His Word and His way of life and some of us squint into the void and say it’s a lot more complex and muddled and who’s to say?

No, we’re not squinting into the void. We’re looking at waterfalls gushing with life. We’re watching the sun sink into a vast ocean, bleeding with beauty. We’re watching the magical glory of a woman, making another person inside of her.

A Fortress of Balloons

Which means the citadels of unbelief are a facade. We’re not up against a fortress of steel, we’re up against a fortress of balloons. And though they glare down at us through peer-reviewed spectacles, using words like ‘reason’ and ‘logic’ and ‘studies-show,’ we can pull out the thumbtack of faith.

Faith sees the world as it actually is. Faith sees the beauty. Faith sees the glory. Faith sees the art, the story, the goodness, and yes, faith sees the evil in the face of it all and knows that something has gone wrong and we have all become part of the problem.

But when the gospel comes, when Jesus comes, He isn’t talking about some other universe, some kind of alien heaven. He’s talking about this world. He’s talking about this beautiful place, and He’s come to forgive our sins, to heal the brokenness, to raise the dead, to restore the glory. And faith sees that. And that’s how faith overcomes the world (1 John 5:4).

Previous post from Toby J. Sumpter:

• Glory Dust

Because we struggle so much with pride, correction can be difficult to give graciously and difficult to receive graciously.

That’s one reason to be very thankful for Exodus 18. God is so kind to have Jethro and Moses give us a clinic on what humble correction looks like on both sides.

The Context

At this point in the story, Jethro, Moses’s father-in-law, had escorted Moses’s wife (his daughter) and two boys to rejoin the wild wilderness adventure and heard first hand all the amazing things that God had done for Israel through Moses. Jethro burst into praise and proclaimed God’s supremacy (verses 10–11).

Then Jethro observed his son-in-law at work. Moses was clearly an extraordinary prophet, leader and judge. But there was a problem. Moses spent his whole day judging one dispute after another. Pending cases were backing up. Jethro could feel the mounting frustration and draining fatigue.

Here’s where the clinic begins.

Corrector: Ask Clarifying Questions

When Moses finally took a break, Jethro asked him a clarifying question: “Why do you sit alone, and all the people stand around you from morning till evening?” (verse 14).

Asking this question was wise and kind. Jethro didn’t jump to a conclusion based on his own perspective. He asked first.

This gave Moses a chance to explain what he was doing and why (verses 15–16): The LORD instructed Moses regarding the law, and Moses’s job was to teach the people and help them apply it to their particular situations. That explanation was helpful.

Corrector: Be Graciously Frank

Understanding this, Jethro said to Moses, “What you are doing is not good. You and the people with you will certainly wear yourselves out, for the thing is too heavy for you. You are not able to do it alone” (verses 17–18).

Jethro was frank: “what you are doing is not good.” No beating around the bush. But Jethro was also gracious. Defective systems can undermine the best mission. His goal was to lift a burden, not tear down intentions.

Corrector: Undergird, Don’t Undermine

Notice that Jethro’s critique wasn’t ad hominem. He didn’t say, “Moses, you’re a lousy leader. It shouldn’t take an administrative genius to see that your system doesn’t scale. Do you think you’re qualified to lead two million people?”

No. Jethro’s goal wasn’t to undermine Moses leadership but undergird him. He observed a problem, sought to understand it, identified the core weakness, and offered a helpful solution (verses 19–23). Jethro aimed to increase the effectiveness of Moses’s time use and the meeting of people’s needs.

Correctee: No Prideful Deflections

Now note Moses’s remarkably humble response: “So Moses listened to the voice of his father-in-law and did all that he had said” (Exodus 18:24).

Moses didn’t bristle defensively at Jethro. He didn’t brush him off as an outsider who didn’t understand the organization. He didn’t try to save face by lying that he’d been thinking about doing that very thing himself. And he didn’t pull spiritual rank on Jethro by reminding him who of the two of them heard directly from God more.

No. Moses gratefully received and immediately implemented Jethro’s counsel.

Correctee: In Correction Listen for God’s Direction

Even though Moses frequently received immediate verbal direction from God, he was not narrow in his understanding of how God speaks and directs. Since God ruled everything he could just as easily direct him through a father-in-law as from a cloud.

If God used Jethro’s correction to direct Moses to greater effectiveness, how much more should we be humbly listening for God’s direction in the correction of those he sends to us?

Correctee: Correction Is a Gift, and Not Only For You

Jethro’s correction wasn’t just God’s provision for Moses, it was also God’s provision for the needs of thousands of people. When God brings correction to us through the loving observation of someone else, it’s a gift, but not only for us. It’s often for many others as well. If we pridefully resist correction, we are likely plugging up a channel of grace to others. There’s more at stake in our humility than we realize.

Summary

So to sum up the lessons from the Exodus 18 Correction Clinic:

When giving correction:

1. Ask clarifying questions to gain a more accurate understanding. Don’t assume.
2. Be graciously frank. Don’t hint or over-qualify. Just say what you see with the humility that you might not be seeing perfectly.
3. Undergird, don’t undermine. Construct, don’t destruct. Be a strength by helping to find a solution that pursues the good of everyone involved.

When receiving correction:

1. No prideful deflections. If the correction is needed, humbly receive it.
2. Listen for God’s direction. God likes to lead us in ways that cultivate our humility.
3. Correction is a gift, and not only for you. Your correction may also be someone else’s provision.

Correction is a form of the Lord’s discipline. And Proverbs 12:1 says, “Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but he who hates reproof is stupid.” May the Lord help us to love knowledge today.

Recent posts from Jon Bloom:

• God’s Bright Design for Your Bitter Providences

• Hope for the Battle with Intractable Weakness

• Six Benefits of Ordinary Daily Devotions

Do you find theology intimidating? Does it sound distant, cold, academic?

Maybe you’ve known people who are really into theology and don’t seem to love Jesus much, or don’t seem to go to the hard places where poverty, suffering, and unbelief live. So you stopped calling after a lousy first date.

But what if your stereotype of theology really isn’t theology? After all, at its simplest, to do theology is to know more and more about God. That doesn’t sound boring or dangerous at all. Theology is the great social network of knowing God. As God, by his Spirit, applies his words from all over the Bible to our soul, imagination, and worldview, we meet him, not just abstract ideas.

There are dangers of unhealthy distraction or obsession or pride, but there’s nothing more important about us than how we think about God. And not just how we think about his love for us, but what we know about who he is and how he works. After all, how much can we love a God we don’t know very well?

So let’s try an exercise. What has God given us to make us more like himself? You might be able to define sanctification, but how would you describe it to someone? How do you picture sanctification? Better, how would you paint it? Meet Grace.

The painting was so beautiful it haunted her. She couldn’t walk by without stopping.

It hung above their fireplace — two love-bird cardinals on a branch beside a nest in a heavily wooded area sometime late October or early November. A few red and yellow leaves remained, but only a few. If you looked close enough, you’d see the old, gray shed almost hidden in the upper right-hand corner.

Her dad had painted the piece several years ago — in fact, he was always painting. He’d see something on a drive or while walking in their neighborhood or flipping through a magazine, and he’d bring it to life right in front of Grace’s ten-year-old light brown eyes with just a brush and a handful of colors.

When Grace Paints

She wanted to be like him, to create like he created — to be conformed to her favorite artist, from one degree of beauty and creativity to another. Her parents would let her play with her own paint, and she would try to imitate the fireplace birds or the flowers in her bedroom or the lighthouse in the bathroom. But nothing she made ever satisfied her like his brush could.

One day, having tried and failed, and tried and failed, she asked Daddy for help. Like most dads, he couldn’t wait to say yes. He set up an easel in his study, placed her chair right in front, his behind hers, and gave her a small palette of colors — just green, red, and yellow with a little white and black.

When Dad Helps

So she began painting. While she was holding the brush, it was hardly her doing the painting. Sure, he never touched the canvas without her, but his mark was in every stroke. He pointed and motioned and taught and even moved her hand with his own. First a tree — trunk, branches, leaves, even a bluebird — then another and another and a trail between them, like the ones they had hiked together last summer.

She saw the scene being born and loved it. It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t anything as good as her dad’s, but it was like his, and it was hers, and they had done it together.

That night she sat staring at her art, treasuring the trees, but seeing more and more flaws. It needed something more — details in the branches, more colors, more life. Tears welled up in her young eyes as she realized just how much was missing. As she studied the painting, longing for more, she fell asleep.

When Morning Dawns

When Grace woke up the next morning, which seemed like no time at all, she found something very different in front of her. This painting reminded her of hers, but it had been changed, strangely made new. She saw all her own strokes, the hours she had put in yesterday, but there was so much more now.

Where there had been two or three shades of green before, now there were two or three hundred, all working together to breathe fullness into her trees. The birds, once flat, were brought to life — made to look real and soft and even hungry. You could almost hear them through the canvas.

Everything she had hoped to see and much more filled her heart far beyond all her imagination had made the night before. Her eyes were wide and full. She carefully searched every inch, looking for any flaw or lack in this little forest. She knew the beauty was hers, and yet it was so much more than hers.

She looked and looked at the painting with wonder. And as she did, her dad walked by holding his morning coffee, smiling as he did. And as she saw him, the same man who had sat with her the day before, she loved him more than ever, because only one was able to do what had been done that night. Only one could make her work this beautiful, this perfect.

It was her brush. His masterpiece. Our sanctification.

It is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. –Philippians 2:13

We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. –2 Corinthians 3:18

When he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. –1 John 3:2–3

Love. There are few things so universal and yet so challenging. Love for God. “The most important commandment,” says Jesus (Mark 12:29–30), and one that both the old and new covenants portray as necessary to enjoy God’s sustained favor. As Moses asserted, Yahweh “keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations,” but he “repays to their face those who hate him, by destroying them” (Deuteronomy 7:9–10). Similarly, Paul declared that “all things work together for good” only for “those who love God . . . who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28).

Some have tagged the Supreme Command of Deuteronomy 6:5 the “all-command,” because of the three-fold “all” — “You shall love the Lᴏʀᴅ your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (ESV). There is no room here for divided affections or allegiance. As Jesus said, “No one can serve two masters” (Matthew 6:24). If indeed there is one God who stands supremely powerful and valuable (Deuteronomy 6:4), this demands a supreme and total loyalty from you and me, a loyalty that starts with the heart.

Loving with All Our Heart

While surprising to some, the old covenant recognized that a spiritual relationship with God begins from within, with a proper disposition toward the preeminent savior, sovereign, and satisfier. From the heart “flow the springs of life” (Proverbs 4:23), and without one’s will, desires, passions, affections, perceptions, and thoughts rightly aligned, the life of love is impossible. Therefore Moses calls Israel to “know . . . in your heart” that God disciplines like a father his son. He urges God’s people to “lay it to heart” that there is no God besides Yahweh (Deuteronomy 4:39–40) and to ensure that his words “be on your heart” (Deuteronomy 6:6), thus anticipating the miraculous heart-work that the new covenant would realize (Jeremiah 31:33).

Loving with All Our Soul

Along with our hearts, we are called to love Yahweh with all our soul. In the first five books of the Old Testament the “soul” refers to one’s whole being as a living person, which includes one’s “heart” but is so much more. For example, in Genesis 2:7 we are told that “Yahweh God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living soul creature” (cf. 9:5). Elsewhere corpses are called “dead souls,” which simply means the person, once alive, is now dead (Leviticus 21:11), and Yahweh promises that his “soul [i.e., his being] shall not abhor” all who follow his lead (Leviticus 26:11). In light of these texts, it seems Moses starts with a call to love God from within and then moves one step larger saying that everything about us as a person is to declare Yahweh as Lord. So we are to love God with our passions, hungers, perceptions, and thoughts. But we are also to love him with how we talk, and what we do with our hands, and how we utilize our talents, and how we react to challenges –– our entire being is to display that we love God.

Loving with All Our Might

What then is the meaning of loving God with our “might”? The word translated “might/strength” in Deuteronomy 6:5 usually functions as the adverb “very” in the Old Testament (298x). The noun version occurs in Deuteronomy and in only one other place, which itself is just an echo of our passage. In 2 Kings 23:25 we are told that King Josiah “turned to Yahweh with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might.” So if the word usually means “very,” what would it mean to love the Lᴏʀᴅ will all our “very-ness”? Interestingly, the Greek translation of this word is “power.” The Aramaic translation is “wealth.” Both of these may actually be pointing in the same direction, for the strength of a person is not simply who he is but what he has at his disposal.

Think with me: If Moses’s call to love Yahweh starts with our heart and then moves out to our being, could not our “very-ness” be one step bigger and include all our resources (see Block, Deuteronomy, 183–84)?

This means that the call to love God is not only with our physical muscle but with everything we have available for honoring God — which includes our spouse, our children, our house or dorm room, our pets and wardrobe and tools and cell phones and movies and music and computers and time.

Whole-hearted, Life-encompassing Allegiance to God

So are we on target reading it this way? The context of Deuteronomy 6 would suggest we are. Verses 6–9 stresses that treasuring God’s oneness and uniqueness needs to be personally applied to our lives (verses 6, 8). It needs to impact relationships (verse 7), and what goes on at home and in the work place (verse 9). This means that the covenant love we’re called to must be wholehearted, life-encompassing, community impacting, exclusive commitment to our God. And this God is our God only because he has now revealed himself to us in the person of his Son. This kind of love we should have for him doesn’t exist apart from love for Jesus — for Jesus and the Father are one (John 10:30).

This truth means that every closet of our lives needs to be opened for cleaning, and every relationship in our lives must be influenced. This call to love God this way destroys any option of being one person at church and another person on a date. What you do on the internet needs to be just as pure as what you do in Bible-reading. The way we talk to our parents needs to be as wholesome as the way we talk to our pastors. There needs to be an authentic love for God that starts with God-oriented affections, desires, and thoughts, that permeates our speaking and behavior, and then influences the way we spend our money and how we dress, and drive, and our forms of entertainment.

Whether we’re eating or singing, jogging or blogging, texting or drawing, love for Yahweh — the one true triune God — is to be in action and seen.

The new narcotic. Morgan Bennett just published an article by this title. The thesis:

Neurological research has revealed that the effect of internet pornography on the human brain is just as potent — if not more so — than addictive chemical substances such as cocaine or heroin.

To make matters worse, there are 1.9 million cocaine users, and 2 million heroin users, in the United States compared to 40 million regular users of online pornography.

Here’s why the addictive power of pornography can be worse:

Cocaine is considered a stimulant that increases dopamine levels in the brain. Dopamine is the primary neurotransmitter that most addictive substances release, as it causes a “high” and a subsequent craving for a repetition of the high, rather than a subsequent feeling of satisfaction by way of endorphins.

Heroin, on the other hand, is an opiate, which has a relaxing effect. Both drugs trigger chemical tolerance, which requires higher quantities of the drug to be used each time to achieve the same intensity of effect.

Pornography, by both arousing (the “high” effect via dopamine) and causing an orgasm (the “release” effect via opiates), is a type of polydrug that triggers both types of addictive brain chemicals in one punch, enhancing its addictive propensity.

But, Bennett says, “internet pornography does more than just spike the level of dopamine in the brain for a pleasure sensation. It literally changes the physical matter within the brain so that new neurological pathways require pornographic material in order to trigger the desired reward sensation.”

Think of the brain as a forest where trails are worn down by hikers who walk along the same path over and over again, day after day. The exposure to pornographic images creates similar neural pathways that, over time, become more and more “well-paved” as they are repeatedly traveled with each exposure to pornography. Those neurological pathways eventually become the trail in the brain’s forest by which sexual interactions are routed. Thus, a pornography user has “unknowingly created a neurological circuit” that makes his or her default perspective toward sexual matters ruled by the norms and expectations of pornography.

Not only do these addictive pathways cause us to filter all sexual stimulation through the pornographic filter; they awaken craving for “more novel pornographic content like more taboo sexual acts, child pornography, or sadomasochistic pornography.”

And it gets worse:

Another aspect of pornography addiction that surpasses the addictive and harmful characteristics of chemical substance abuse is its permanence. While substances can be metabolized out of the body, pornographic images cannot be metabolized out of the brain because pornographic images are stored in the brain’s memory.

“In sum,” Bennett writes, “brain research confirms the critical fact that pornography is a drug delivery system that has a distinct and powerful effect upon the human brain and nervous system.”

None of this takes God by surprise. He designed the interplay between the brain and the soul. Discoveries of physical dimensions to spiritual reality do not nullify spiritual reality.

When Jesus said, “I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28), he saw with crystal clarity — the way a designer sees his invention — that the physical eye had profound effects on the spiritual “heart.”

And when the Old Testament wise man said in Proverbs 23:7, literally, “As he thinks in his soul, so is he,” he saw with similar clarity that soul acts create being. Thinking in the soul corresponds to “is.” And this “is” includes the body.

In other words, it goes both ways. Physical reality affects the heart. And the heart affects physical reality (the brain). Therefore, this horrific news from brain research about the enslaving power of pornography is not the last word. God has the last word. The Holy Spirit has the greatest power. We are not mere victims of our eyes and our brains. I know this both from Scripture and from experience. And I will write more about it next Tuesday.

Related resources:

• Sexual Sin in the Ministry by Harry Schaumburg

• Fake Love, Fake War: Why So Many Men Are Addicted to Internet Porn and Video Games by Russell Moore

• Porn, Pride, and Praise: An Interview with Heath Lambert, Authors on the Line

Whether you’ve read the Chronicles of Narnia, the Space Trilogy, Mere Christianity, or other works by C.S. Lewis, you’ve probably wanted to ask him some questions. While we can’t give you the man himself — he died 50 years ago this fall — we might have your answer. Or 23 of them.

Our recent national conference dove deeply into the life, heart, and influence of Lewis, celebrating all we’ve learned through him and asking the hard questions of his writing. It’s a collection of talks that offers a big, thorough look at Lewis — his God, imagination, books, theology, friendships, worship, and more.

Please enjoy and share all the audio and video below free of charge.

Main Sessions

• John Piper: “C.S. Lewis, Romantic Rationalist: How His Paths to Christ Shaped His Life and Ministry”

• Philip Ryken: “Inerrancy and the Patron Saint of Evangelicalism: C.S. Lewis on Holy Scripture”

• Douglas Wilson: “Undragoned: C.S. Lewis on the Gift of Salvation”

• Kevin Vanhoozer: “In Bright Shadow: C.S. Lewis on the Imagination for Theology and Discipleship”

• Speaker Panel: “Uncovering Lewis’s Uncommon Influence”

• Randy Alcorn: “C.S. Lewis on Heaven and the New Earth: God’s Eternal Remedy to the Problem of Evil and Suffering”

• John Piper: “What God Made Is Good — And Must Be Sanctified: C.S. Lewis and St. Paul on the Use of Creation”

Seminars

• N.D. Wilson: “Myth Wars: C.S. Lewis vs. Scientism”

• Colin Duriez: “The Friendship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien”

• Lyle Dorsett: “C.S. Lewis and the Care of Souls”

• Joe Rigney: “Live Like a Narnian: Christian Discipleship in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles”

Small Talks (10-minute messages)

• Sam Storms: “How Lewis Changed the Way I Worship”

• Noel Piper: “Latecomer to Narnia”

• N.D. Wilson: “The Lie of Realism”

• Joe Rigney: “Lewis Against Hipsters — And Those Who Despise Them”

• Jonathan Parnell: “Pizza! Pizza! Lewis at Little Caesars”

• David Mathis: “Fed up with Life and Ready to Write”

• Tony Reinke: “Jack’s Typewriter”

• Matt Reagan: “A Child’s Heart and a Grown-up’s Head”

• Lyle Dorsett: “Longing in Lewis’s Life and Writing”

• Colin Duriez: “Was Lewis a Revolutionary or Dinosaur?”

• Devin Brown: “A Quick Look at the Best of ‘Screwtape’”

• Dan Dewitt: “Why Lewis Wouldn’t Write for ‘Christianity Today’”

Download the song list from the sessions of corporate worship (PDF).

• 15 Quotes from the C.S. Lewis Conference

As we finish uploading all the audio and video of the C.S. Lewis conference online for you in the next few hours, here’s a sampling of fifteen quotes from the conference talks that caught our attention. These will give you a flavor of what to expect when you enjoy the conference recordings for yourself (soon).

UPDATE: All the conference media is now available.

Douglas Gresham, conference introduction video —

This year the conference is titled, “The Romantic Rationalist: God, Life, and Imagination in the Work of C.S. Lewis.” Jack, my stepfather, would be pleased by your organization’s name: Desiring God. For perhaps the most important element that led to his own conversion was a strange and powerful longing that he felt throughout his life. Though for many years he did not know what this was a longing for, in the end, he came to see that all along it had been a desire for God.

John Piper, first plenary, “C.S. Lewis, Romantic Rationalist: How His Paths to Christ Shaped His Life and Ministry” —

What was Lewis doing in all his works? He was pointing. He was unveiling. He was depicting the glory of God in the face of Jesus. He was leading people to Christ. The two paths he knew best were the paths of romanticism and rationalism — longing and logic. So these are the paths on which he guided people to Christ.

Joe Rigney, seminar, “Live Like a Narnian: Christian Discipleship in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles” —

We are, all of us, en-storied creatures, living our lives in a narrative, which means our lives have directions, trends, and trajectories. And Lewis is mindful of the fact that these trajectories are governed by an Author who is not mocked, who tells us that we will reap what we’ve sown. … Lewis is clear: we are always sowing the seeds of our future selves. We are embarked, heading in a particular direction, and sooner or later we are bound to end up there. Edmund reminds us that we might not like the destination at the end of our road. When it comes time to reap, we may find ourselves tied to a tree with a dagger at our necks. But, of course, Edmund’s story isn’t a tragedy. Yes, it’s true; reaping always follows sowing, like night follows day. But in this case, Aslan reaps what Edmund has sown. Edmund’s treachery, Edmund’s spite, Edmund’s beastliness is thrown onto Aslan and the Lion bears it away in his death at the Stone Table. This is the Magic of substitution, the Deeper Magic that turns traitors into kings, that turns beastly boys into just and wise men, the kind of magic that changes our stories forever.

Devin Brown, small talk, “A Quick Look at the Best of ‘Screwtape’” —

Long before there was Narnia there was Screwtape. For the one and only time in his life, C.S. Lewis appeared on the cover of Time Magazine (1947), pictured with a devil over his shoulder. The Screwtape Letters is the book that put him on the cover.

Randy Alcorn, plenary, “C.S. Lewis on Heaven and the New Earth: God’s Eternal Remedy to the Problem of Evil and Suffering” —

Why does Reepicheep the mouse want to go to Aslan’s country? To be with Aslan. It is all about Jesus. We are made for a person and a place. Jesus is the person, heaven is the place — but the place is meaningless if Jesus isn’t there.

C.S. Lewis on Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, as quoted by Piper in his first plenary —

I’ve never met Orcs or Ents or Elves — but the feel of it, the sense of a huge past, of lowering danger, of heroic tasks achieved by the most apparently unheroic people, of distance, vastness, strangeness, homeliness (all blended together) is so exactly what living feels like to me. Particularly the heart-breaking quality in the most beautiful places, like Lothlorien.

Kevin Vanhoozer, plenary, “In Bright Shadow: C.S. Lewis on the Imagination for Theology and Discipleship” —

For Lewis, waking is a way of describing conversion — a coming to new life. The Christian life is all about wakefulness. Theology describes what we see when we are awake, and discipleship is about staying awake. The sad truth is many of us are at best only half awake. We think we’re engaged with the real world — the world of stock markets, stock car racing, stockpiles of weapons — but in fact, we’re living in what Lewis calls the Shadowlands. We’re really daydreaming and sleepwalking our way through life, asleep at the wheel of existence. …

Theology ministers understanding, so that we can live out our knowledge of God. Theology is practical, it is all about waking up to the real, to what is, specifically to what is ‘in Christ.’ … The imagination helps disciples act out what is ‘in Christ.’ Theology exchanges the false pictures that hold us captive with truth and disciplines our imagination with sound doctrine.

Phillip Ryken, plenary, “Inerrancy and the Patron Saint of Evangelicalism: C.S. Lewis on Holy Scripture” —

Lewis’s doctrine of Scripture [inspiration/inerrancy] has often been regarded as sub-orthodox. But whatever deficiencies we find, they do not seem to have a devastating effect on his theology as a whole. Typically, such theologians downgrade other doctrines, they back away from the hard sayings of Jesus, or become skeptical about biblical miracles, or dismiss the deity of Christ. Lewis did none of that. He continued to give a robust defense of biblical Christianity.

Plenary panel discussion —

Phillip Ryken: [Contrasted to living authors who deny inerrancy] Lewis is very clear he wants to be in submission to the authority of Scripture. There are some people in the church today; you sometimes get the sense they’re standing a little bit in authority over Scripture. You don’t get that sense with Lewis.

Randy Alcorn: And a lot of people today who are Christian leaders are drifting; they have grown up holding to truths they’re now departing from, their trajectory is away from the gospel. Lewis came from atheism, moving to agnosticism, theism, came to a life-changing faith in Christ — he was growing in his life. He came from a world where he didn’t have the doctrinal reference points. His trajectory was, in my opinion, toward the gospel.

N.D. Wilson, small talk, “The Lie of Realism” —

Lewis wrote fantasy stories because he thought, correctly, that that’s what the world is really like. The lie of realism is that somehow we’ve let people name ‘important fiction’ in which there is no soul, no spirit, no supernatural — “realistic.” In realistic fiction, there can be no magic, no supernatural, no God, no soul to the character. … We’re on a rock, mostly molten lava, flying through outer space at about mach-86 right now, like a yo-yo being swung around a ball of fire in the sky. That’s our setting. What kind of story are we telling? We’re in the sci-fi fantasy section of the bookstore.

Douglas Wilson, plenary, “Undragoned: C.S. Lewis on the Gift of Salvation” —

I don’t feel safe around anything when Jesus is not the Lord of it. Calvinism without Jesus is deadly; it’s fatalism, it’s simply Islam. We need Jesus. When the precious doctrines [of Calvinism] are used to perpetuate gloom, severity, introspection, accusations, morbidity, slander, gnat-stringing, and more, the soul is not safe.

C.S. Lewis as quoted by Sam Storms in his small talk —

Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.

John Piper, final plenary, “What God Made Is Good — And Must Be Sanctified: C.S. Lewis and St. Paul on the Use of Creation” —

Eating food becomes worship by acts that terminate on God not merely on food. Thanking is for food, but to God. Believing is believing in God and his Son Jesus Christ. Knowing terminates on truth and ultimately on God. Eating is not worship. Eating becomes worship — through knowing and believing and thanking. The created world is not an end in itself. It finds its meaning when people, created in God’s image, use it with a mind that knows God, and a heart that believes in and thanks God. …

I’m suggesting, along with Lewis, that of all the possible ways that God could have revealed the fullness and diversity of the supreme value of his being, he concluded that a physical world would be the best. The material creation was not God’s way of saying to humankind: “I am not enough for you.” It was his way of saying: “Here is the best garden where more of what I am can be revealed to finite creatures. The juiciness of a peach and the sweetness of honey are a communication of myself.”

Do you ever worry?

I think we can all admit that we do. In fact, we probably worry more than we realize. As a mother, I find myself worrying about my children, about their health, their learning, and whether I can just make it to bedtime each day.

I also find myself worried about paying bills, about my husband’s travel for work, and about that message from my doctor needing to discuss test results with me. My to-do lists keep me awake at night because I fear I’ll forget to do something important. Questions like “what if?” and “should I have?” swirl around my mind, holding me hostage and keeping me chained to my worries and fears.

Worry is a kind of “acceptable sin.” By that I mean worry is one of those sins that everyone does so we don’t often address it. Like gossip, worry is something we all know we aren’t supposed to do, but we often gloss over it and call it something else — something like stress. Especially for women, worry can be expected and in some situations to not worry would seem strange.

But deep down, we want to be freed from the chronic feeling of doom and the expectation of something bad lurking just around the corner. We know that the Bible tells us not to worry, but “what if?” thoughts seem like such a part of us that we don’t know how to stop.

What can we do?

Remember and Pray

Like oil and water, trust and worry do not mix. To expel worry from our heart, we need to grow deeper roots of trust in God. Time and again in the Psalms, when the writer’s heart was heavy, he turned to look back at all that God had done for him. As the psalmist looked back at God’s faithfulness and his sovereign care for him, he was able to trust God even in the midst of troubling circumstances.

When we look back in our own lives at God’s faithfulness to us, it gives us confidence and hope in his future faithfulness. We look back to our own story of salvation. We see that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, that this is the demonstration of God’s love for us. When worries threaten to seize our heart, we need to remember and dwell on the truth of the gospel. Remembering the cross propels us in faith for what lies ahead.

And as we remember, we need to turn to God in prayer. Hebrews says that because of Jesus, we can come to the throne of grace with confidence, to receive the help we need (Hebrews 4:16). Paul was referring to chronic worry when he wrote in Philippians 4:6, “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.” We are to give our worries to God in prayer, trusting him with all our burdens and cares. As a result, we will receive in return the peace we long for, “And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:7).

You might even pray something like this. . . .

A Prayer for the Worried Heart

My Papa in Heaven,

I come to you with a heart heavy and full of so many worries and cares. I want to just curl up on your lap and find some peace from the chaos in my life. My worries fill my mind night and day. My stomach is in knots and I can hardly breathe. I feel like I am drained dry; the joy has been sucked right out of me.

But you said to come to you with all my burdens. You said that you will carry them. You tell us you are a rock, a shield, a fortress. I need a rock right now. I need a fortress to run into right now. I need you.

There are so many decisions to make. What if I make the wrong one? So many bad things loom on the horizon, what if I’m not prepared? Help me to focus my heart on you and not on the giants around me. I know that all these worries are keeping me from trusting you. Like Peter, instead of looking toward your face, I am looking around at the waves encircling me.

Forgive me for doubting and not living a life of trust. I believe, but please help my unbelief! I know that when I worry, I am believing a lie that says that I can control what happens in my life. Forgive me for trying to control something I never really had control of. Help me to trust in your word and not the lies.

You sent your Son to carry my greatest burden at the cross. I know that you can handle all that troubles me today. There is nothing too great for you, the earth is your footstool and the wind and rain come and go at your command. Free me of this worry today. Help me to trust the same grace that saved me at the cross to save me from all that weighs me down.

I know that you have a perfect plan for my life. Help me to walk by faith and not by sight. I want to trust in your plan and your love for me. I want to face the unknown future confident that you have it under control. Grant me the grace I need.

Thank you for Jesus and that because of him I can come to you in confidence. You accept me as I am, worries and all. I give them all to you now, in Jesus’s name, Amen.

Related posts from Grace at Home:

• A Tantrum for My Transformation

• The Family: God’s Litmus Test of Applied Grace

• Motherhood Is a Calling (And Where Your Children Rank)

The point of this little exhortation is that, in handling the Scriptures, sanctification and speculation rise and fall in inverse proportion. As speculation increases, sanctification decreases. The more guessing the less blessing.

Few people would give their life for a speculation. Few will gouge out an eye or cut off a hand, because of a guess. Suppositions make weak expositions.

Here’s the sort of thing I have in mind.

Preachers, teachers, and Bible study leaders are sometimes tempted to speculate because the “possibilities” are so interesting.

• For example, what about possible appearances of Christ in the Old Testament? When it says God was walking in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:8) could that have been Christ? Was Melchizedek really Christ himself in Genesis 14? When “the Lord” appeared to Abraham in Genesis 18 was that a pre-incarnate appearance of Christ? When Jacob wrestled all night with “a man” (Genesis 32:24) was it Christ? Was the fourth person in the fiery furnace (Daniel 3:25) Christ?

• Could the splitting of the waters of the Red Sea be explainable by God’s using some cosmic catastrophe to create atmospheric conditions that caused the waters to divide?

• Was there a written document containing all the material common to Matthew and Luke but missing from Mark, which we might call Q for German Quelle, meaning source?

• Was the later poverty of the church in Jerusalem (Romans 15:26) owing to the misapplication of the early policy of having “all things in common” (Acts 2:44, 4:32)?

• Was Paul a widower? Or did his wife leave him when he became a Christian? Did he have children?

• Did Mary Magdalene have a crush on Jesus? Did Jesus have to deal with more temptations than we usually think?

• When Paul prohibited women from teaching and having authority over men in 1 Timothy 2:12 was there a problem in that church such as women taking authority and teaching, who were unprepared to do so? Was that the only reason Paul prohibited them — they weren’t ready?

See What’s There

My point is that people need solid food, not possible food. They need a sure word from God, not a guess from man. They need a biblical “Thus says the Lord,” not a “Maybe God said.”

A fascinating five-minute homiletic detour into what might have been going in Corinth behind this or that text is a waste of precious time. And I think it trains our people to expect interludes of historical entertainment, and to mistake it for deep insight and spiritual food.

What is really there in the text of Scripture is bottomless, and staggeringly interesting, and provocative. Speculation is not necessary to hold people’s attention. If a pastor finds what might have been more interesting than what is really there in the text, he needs better powers of observation, not better powers of speculation. He needs a better feel for the wonder of what is, than a greater fancy for what might have been.

What About Poetry?

Two qualifications:

1. Poetry and preaching are not the same. Illuminating fiction and authoritative exposition are not the same. I love poetry and fiction. These are by nature inventive. They too have their place and their power. But the sanctifying power they have is owing decisively to the deeper truths they convey, not the imaginative structures that convey them.

2. When a text of Scripture is apparently contradictory, and there is little agreement on what the solution is, it is helpful for people to see one or two possible and plausible solutions. These will be more or less speculative. We tell our people we are not sure of the answer. We don’t want them to take our guesses as God’s word. But we offer our guesses so that they can see at least the possibility that there is a solution here rather than a contradiction.

Dive Deeper

So I say again, the crying need in the pulpit and the classroom is not to spend time speculating about what might have been the case, but to dig deeper into what is really there in the text. Most of us are still scratching the surface.

If we know for sure something that’s not in the Bible, and we see that it sheds true light on the Bible, that’s another matter. Let it be so. But my sense is that the secondary literature is no easier to interpret than the Bible. Which means that the secondary texts are no more clear than the biblical texts they supposedly illumine. It is a harmful thing to teach seminarians to see the Bible as needing help from outside, while failing to see that the outside documents also need help from the outside.

Pastors and teachers have very limited time for study. The ocean of contextually understandable Scripture is bottomless. My plea is simple: dive deeper in what’s there.

See translated versions:

• 什么是猎奇而无用的解经

• Como ser Interessante e Inútil

• Como ser interesante y poco útil

Recent posts from John Piper:

• Does “Mere Christianity” Mean Eliminate Denominations?

• The Strange Glory of Ordinary Things

• Don’t Do God’s Will Like an Atheist

ATLANTA — It was our first time at Catalyst, and we were prepared for some highly produced craziness.

They have fired a man from a cannon, belly-flopped another guy 30 feet into a kiddie pool, offered camel rides onsite, and set ridiculous world record after ridiculous world record — including bubbles, Frisbees, and whoopee cushions. Not exactly where you expect to find our 67-year-old Pastor John.

But the biggest spectacle at Catalyst, or any other place in the world, is Jesus Christ, the sinless Son of God crucified for sinners. And John Piper had the amazing opportunity on Thursday to speak of this Jesus to more than 12,000 young, gifted leaders gathered at the Gwinnett Arena in Atlanta.

In summary, his message makes clear that you were created to display God. You are made in the image of Another, and all of us have failed to fulfill our one great purpose. But Jesus — the great spectacle of history — has purchased our re-creation with his death at Calvary. And now the best news in the whole world is that, in Christ, God’s unfailing pursuit of his glory has become his unfailing pursuit to make you happy in himself forever.

As many might imagine, it was a sudden shift in tone from the leadership-oriented talks characteristic of the Catalyst movement, but it became clear that this message provides the ground and substance of leadership and ministry — a substance that can never be replaced by savvy techniques, entertaining stunts, or skinny jeans.

Stream or download the 42-minute message, “Identity and Desire.”

Recent new messages from John Piper:

• The Cost of Love and the Power of Pleasure

• No Christian Suffering Is Meaningless

• How God Makes Our Nothing into Everything

The Christian life can be so complex — and oh so very simple.

That we would use such a fancy word as sanctification betrays the complexity. But that defining such a big word could be so easy hints at the simplicity.

Big Word, Modest Meaning

The word sanctification is built on the Latin sanctus, meaning “holy.” Sanctification is the theological term we Christians often use for the process of being made holy. For the Christian, whose standard of perfect human holiness is Jesus, the God-man, sanctification is essentially becoming more like Jesus — being “conformed to the image of his Son,” as Romans 8:29 puts it.

Christian growth, or maturation, is another way to define sanctification. It’s a big word for the little-by-little progress of the everyday Christian life. That much is simple. But what it encompasses is enormous: how every professing Christian should live, where our holiness is heading, how fast the progress should be, and how it happens in real life. Here’s where it gets complicated and controversial.

When Walking with Jesus Gets Messy

Sanctification talk gets prickly quickly because it immediately involves so many massive realities in the Christian worldview and their coming together in daily life: grace and works, law and gospel, faith and the Holy Spirit, Christian obedience and pleasing God, love and good deeds, and much more. And sanctification gets very personal — it’s about the details of your life.

The stakes are high. Weak spots in our theology will turn up, before long, in our understanding, and pursuit, of sanctification. It doesn’t take much time before a wacky doctrine elsewhere begins to mess with our doctrine and practice of holiness. True Christian theology is a seamless garment, and every doctrine eventually relates to every other, but sanctification seems to call the question faster than the others, and has the tendency to accentuate our problem areas.

Beware a False Simplicity

Because of the inherent complexity of sanctification, involving all these moving pieces, there is a great temptation to oversimplify things. Because sanctification with all its tentacles feels like an octopus larger than we can comfortably tame, we tend to prefer our own little theological house pets that we can easily train and remain captain of. It’s nice to have a slogan that can keep it simple for stupid humans and make us feel like we’re in control.

Enticing as it sounds — and convicting as it may be to hear about if you’ve tried it — the well of sanctification reductionisms soon runs dry. “Let go and let God” — it won’t be long before that creates some problems. “Simply obey” — that won’t do it either. “Just get used to your justification” — attractive, yes, but there’s another reductionism at work here. Even “union with Christ as the key,” close as it may be, falls short of capturing the full picture.

No Silver Bullet

It’s as if we find the biblical data to be just too numerous and complicated, and what we really need is to search for sanctification’s holy grail. It must be out there somewhere — surely, there’s some quick fix, some theological secret to discover, some doctrinal key that unlocks what holiness really is and how to have it.

But if there’s any key to sanctification, it’s this: abandon your search for the key. At least abandon the search for a shortcut. Let your quest for the holy grail of sanctification end right here and right now, and commit to a sanctification not of only, but of all — all the Scriptures, all of Christian theology, all the Bible’s salvific pictures, and, ultimately, all of Jesus.

Embrace the Complexity

What is needed for Christian sanctification is not some silver-bullet doctrine or fresh slogan or new overriding emphasis, but the whole of the Bible, theology, and Jesus. The same Jesus who is our righteousness for justification is the same Jesus who is our holiness for sanctification — and is the same Jesus we’re united to by faith to receive all God’s priceless graces.

By virtue of our Spirit-powered, by-faith union with Jesus, we have the new-creation spiritual life of regeneration, and the righteousness of justification, and the holiness of sanctification, and the familial affection and privilege of adoption, and the honor of glorification. This is big. It gets complicated. There are so many ducks that it’s hard to get them all in a row — and that’s just the way God would have it. After all, he is the sanctifier, not we. He would rather we always lean on him for holiness than supposing we have it figured out.

With a Singular Focus

But even in all the complexity, there is a point of focus that can help us get our bearings and give us some semblance of simplicity. The beginning and end of Christian sanctification is none other than Christ himself. There is an initial relationship with Jesus that first sets us apart as definitively sanctified, and gets the gears going for our ongoing sanctification, but a deepening relationship with Jesus is the heart of sanctification, and knowing Jesus is the great goal of our sanctification.

Jesus is not only the preeminently sanctified one and the one who empowers our sanctification by his Spirit, but also he is the one whom the whole of our sanctification is shaping us to know forever (Ephesians 5:26–27). Knowing Jesus drives us onward in sanctification now (Philippians 3:8), and knowing Jesus is the eternal life that sanctification fits us for (John 17:3).

This One Great End

The greatest blessing of salvation is not mere forgiveness. It’s not just justification and being declared righteous. It’s not new birth. It’s not even sanctification. It’s not just the privilege of being united to him, but being united to him serves the greater goal of enjoying him.

The greatest blessing of redemption is Jesus himself. All aspects of the Spirit’s subjective application to us, and all of Jesus’s objective accomplishments for us, conspire to this one great end: knowing Jesus, enjoying Jesus, admiring Jesus, and treasuring Jesus for all eternity.

David Mathis writes on “The Search for Sanctification’s Holy Grail” in Desiring God’s newly available Acting the Miracle: God’s Work and Ours in the Mystery of Sanctification, which includes contributions from John Piper, Kevin DeYoung, Ed Welch, Jarvis Williams, and Russell Moore. The book is now available in softcover, as well as a free PDF, from Crossway Books and Desiring God.

In the outskirts of the city, on a road that’s walked as much as driven, a typical car brakes at a red light.

It is the kind of car so typical that the actual model stays blurry in memory. It is the kind of braking so natural that the driver must know this block. Everything in the scene fits: the worn road, the red light, the common car, but not the bumper sticker. That is a different story, with its weathered corners and sunbaked background accenting a phrase in all-caps Comic Sans: “Success Starts on Sunday.”

There is also a church name, one as typical as the car, listed below the slogan in smaller letters. And now we get it. Said straight, the shiny message on this tattered sticker goes:

If you want success then go to church.

We’ve seen this before. Whether the devil’s out to get us or that big promotion needs reeling in, the most necessary thing for us to do, as this initiative would say, is to be at church today. Prophesying peril is one way; promising prosperity is another — and it’s actually more insidious.

A lot more folks like the sound of success over the sensationalism of Satan-talk. Whole movements are built on that, in fact. And even if we’re not driving to a basketball arena this morning, there’s still a chance we’ll be gigged by that gimmick. Does success really start on Sunday? Does it?

The real question is, “What do we want?”

If what we’re really after is to drive a nice vehicle or wear tailored suits or pad the 401k or grow business clientele or raise healthy kids or feel good about ourselves, then church attendance is not our problem. Idolatry is.

And if idolatry is our problem, we don’t need success, we need dust and ashes. We need to be made alive. Sunday, indeed, brings us hope for that, but it’s not this Sunday. It was a Sunday two thousand years ago when the earth shook and a large stone was rolled away. Jesus Christ, our Savior, crucified for our sins, dead in our place, was raised in power to overcome every obstacle to our everlasting joy in God.

Truth is, success doesn’t start on Sunday. Victory was accomplished on Sunday, and therefore we worship God alone, today and every other day of the week.

Recent posts from Jonathan Parnell:

• It’s Time to Celebrate

• Pizza! Pizza! Waking Up in Little Caesar’s

• Don’t Go to Church to Give

It’s everywhere you turn, yet so easily keeps itself hidden.

It’s pervasive in advertising and steers the course of political debates. It lives in all our hearts, but seems so petty that we’re unwilling to admit its presence.

But in God’s economy, envy is sinful and dangerous. It makes frequent cameos in the New Testament lists of nastiness (Mark 7:22; Romans 1:29; 1 Timothy 6:4; Titus 3:3). We hear that “love does not envy” (1 Corinthians 13:4), that sadly some “preach Christ from envy” (Philippians 1:15), and, worst of all, that “it was out of envy” that they delivered up Jesus to be crucified (Matthew 27:18; Mark 15:10). And so we’re directed to fight it (Galatians 5:26; 1 Peter 2:1).

Envy and Its Accomplices

Envy, says Joe Rigney, is a feeling of unhappiness at the blessing of others. It’s different than jealousy, which orients on what we ourselves own and is not always a sin. Envy orients on others and their blessing. And it hunts in a pack, keeping company with other “works of the flesh,” like covetousness, malice, rivalry, and resentment (Galatians 5:19–21).

But as tricky as envy is — in both its pervasiveness and hiddenness — it is highly susceptible to the sword of the Spirit (Ephesians 6:17; Romans 8:13). Awareness of envy’s masks, and direct confrontation through faith in the promises of God, go a long way in smiting the green-eyed monster. As does thankfulness. “It’s hard for envy to hide in a grateful heart,” says Rigney.

God’s Lavish Inequality

In this new episode of Theology Refresh, Rigney takes this bull by the horns, not only making us mindful of its power and patterns, but also preparing us to fight. He gets us ready not just to play defense against envy — “the great leveler,” as Dorothy Sayers called it — but also to go on the offensive in pursuit of the riches of God’s lavish inequality. That’s right, there’s a kind of inequality that God loves, and discovering the beauty of God’s gracious variety (Romans 12:6; 1 Corinthians 12:4; 1 Peter 4:10) just might be one of the breakthrough for you against envy.

To access this 13-minute episode, subscribe to Theology Refresh in iTunes, listen at the resource page, or download the audio.

Joe Rigney is professor at Bethlehem College & Seminary in Minneapolis. He gave the seminar “Live Like a Narnian” at the recent Desiring God 2013 National Conference, and is author of a new book by the same title, available in softcover and for Kindle.

Recent episodes of Theology Refresh:

• The Joy of Praising Others

• Giving the Gospel Graciously

• Church Planting and Missional Communities

• Simple Church Planting

To subscribe or see the full list of almost 50 episodes, visit Theology Refresh in the iTunes store.

All the hot-button topics were on the table Sunday night in downtown Minneapolis. Bethlehem College and Seminary hosted a dialogue on Christ and culture with John Piper and Douglas Wilson, moderated by Joe Rigney. The video is now available.

Early on, the conversation turned to slavery, racism, and Wilson’s controversial stance which sparked a lengthy online debate with Thabiti Anyabwile just months ago. Piper, who closely followed the entire debate, offered his seasoned reflections on the interchange.

Wilson shared about growing up in segregated Annapolis and how his father trained him to hate the discrimination. He also gave the backstory to his provocative book Black and Tan, and Piper offered six reasons for his ongoing association with Wilson — including, “Doug hates racism from the core of his gospel soul.”

The dialogue then transitioned to abortion, and later to homosexuality, its prominence in America, and how the Church can vocally oppose the pro-gay agenda without alienating Christians who struggle with same-sex attraction.

The full conversation is captured in this two-hour video — and see the detailed timestamps below for the bits you might find particularly interesting.

Setting the Stage

0:00:00 • Hellos, intros, and prayer.

0:04:02 • Should moral chaos in America make us panic?

0:09:15 • Should moral chaos in America make us passive?

On Slavery and Race

0:16:06 • Douglas Wilson’s position on slavery and racial reconciliation.

0:21:10 • John Piper’s takeaways from Wilson and Thabiti Anyabwile’s 111-page blog discussion on slavery and race.

0:22:53 • Six reasons the risk of partnering with Wilson is worth it for Piper.

0:26:55 • Wilson on whether his presence jeopardizes racial reconciliation.

0:30:12 • Wilson on the Anyabwile debate.

0:31:57 • The backstory behind Wilson’s book Black and Tan.

0:36:42 • Piper on making emotional connections in reconciliation.

0:39:20 • Piper on growing up in segregated Greenville, SC.

0:40:38 • Wilson on growing up in segregated Annapolis, MD.

0:42:58 • Wilson: The key to all reconciliation is God-centeredness.

0:45:50 • Wilson: We need to receive hard truths from African American brothers, and be willing to offer them.

0:46:56 • Why do African American Christians vote for pro-abortion politicians?

0:54:48 • Abortion as the slavery of the 20th century.

0:58:26 • Is the slavery/abortion link insensitive?

On Opposing Postmodern Sexuality

1:03:02 • Do you care about your reputation in debates? And how should Christian leaders address controversies (bold offending, cowardly retreating, non-offending edification)?

1:16:13 • Where is our culture on homosexuality? Where is it headed?

1:17:48 • Wilson: The central problems of culture are worship problems.

1:23:02 • Piper: How to be an effective idol-blasting Christian.

1:24:33 • Piper: I don’t know where culture is going. Collapse? Revival?

1:26:01 • Wilson: God’s kingdom progresses from triumph to triumph via apparent disasters (the cross).

1:28:06 • Why Piper avoids sodomy language in the homosexual debate.

1:35:06 • Why Wilson uses sodomy language in the homosexual debate.

1:39:48 • How to attack cultural apostles of homosexuality without alienating Christians struggling with same-sex attractions.

1:45:22 • Piper: Be slow to judge the heart of a Christian speaking online.

On Preparing for Persecution

1:47:35 • If persecution is coming to America, how should the Church ready herself?

1:53:26 • Piper closes in prayer.

This is the will of God, your sanctification. (1 Thessalonians 4:3)

“God Moves in a Mysterious Way”

God tells us everything we need to know to live godly lives (2 Peter 1:3). But sometimes we wonder.

The unexpected, unexplained twists and turns our lives take create all kinds of apparent uncertainties for us. And the profound pain we endure can be so perplexing. There is so much God doesn’t tell us — so much we think we would really like to know.

But as Deuteronomy 29:29 says, “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever.”

This means that as creatures we must learn to live contentedly with what God intends to be mysterious to us and grab hold of the revealed things with everything we have.

“Deep in Unfathomable Mines”

The secrets God keeps from us are a greater mercy to us than we likely realize. We often forget just how thin is the sliver of reality we see and information we can contain at any given time. Humans are not equipped to handle what the Bible calls “the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17).

When we want God to start giving us some answers, we need the Bible to help us get our heads out of the claustrophobic confines of our private worlds and into the galactic greatness of what God is allowing us to be a part of. We need to remember that we’re dealing with God here.

God is a person for whom time, space, and matter present no limitations. He has dimensions accessible to him that we know nothing about. He is Trinitarian in his essence (Matthew 28:19). He holds tens (maybe hundreds) of billions of galaxies together by the word of his power (Hebrews 1:3). He has created and governs every throne, dominion, ruler or authority (Colossians 1:16) and every being that is invisible to us, whether angel (Romans 8:38) or demon (Luke 4:41). He is orchestrating all of human history (Acts 17:26) with its multiple billions of complex individuals past, present, and future — of which each of us is only one — and multiple trillions of interweaving causes and effects — of which each of us only experiences a relative handful. And he’s working all of these things toward a point when every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2:10–11).

And we wonder why we struggle to understand what God is doing in our difficult circumstances.

“He Treasures Up His Bright Designs”

God is doing ten thousand things in our circumstances! That’s likely a significant underestimate.

We would fall on our faces in awe-filled worship if we saw the chain reaction for our eternal good (Romans 8:28) and that of other present and future believers that God is engineering in just one seemingly random occurrence (Proverbs 16:33) that today might be the source of our grumbling because of the grief it is causing us. Now think of a lifetime’s worth.

God doesn’t explicitly promise this, but I tend to think that one of the glories and joys of the age to come will be God’s unveiling of the bright, extensive designs of his bitter providences in this age and the grace upon grace upon grace that they unleashed while we, not knowing, simply held on to Proverbs 3:5 with all our might.

“His Purposes Will Ripen Fast”

But what God does explicitly promise is that every moment and level of suffering we experience as we live by faith (Romans 1:17) “is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Corinthians 4:17).

That thing that you don’t want, that you’re weary of, that you plead with God to remove (and might remove at some point unless he says otherwise [2 Corinthians 12:9]) is preparing you for glory.

God’s will for you is your sanctification (1 Thessalonians 4:3). He wants you to share his holiness (Hebrews 12:10). And the kindness of God in pursuing this for you is incomprehensively wonderful because without his holiness you will have no real and lasting happiness. Only in his presence is fullness of joy (Psalm 16:11) and only the pure in heart will see him (Matthew 5:8).

You want him to make you holy. You really do. Whatever it takes.

“Ye Fearful Saints Fresh Courage Take”

The God who governs the visible and invisible worlds knows what he is doing in your life. The God who was brutally murdered on a Roman cross knows what it’s like to suffer and how to redeem it. Specifically how he will bring good out of your trials may be mysterious to you now, but that he will bring good out of them is not a mystery. It’s a promise.

And this is where you get to participate with God in your sanctification! You get to act the miracle. You work out your salvation (Philippians 2:12) by believing the promises God makes to you (John 6:29).

And as you believe God’s promises you will bear the “peaceful fruit of righteousness” (Hebrews 12:11), which are the attitudes and actions of those who live by faith in the Son of God (Galatians 2:20). Behavior always follows belief. So your belief will result in faith-filled obedience to God (Romans 1:5) and produce various kinds of faith-fueled works for God (2 Thessalonians 1:11).

The secret things are the Lord’s for a very good reason. Trust him with the mystery. But the revealed things are yours and they are glorious. Believe them and one day you’ll share God’s holiness and all the forevermore pleasures he has prepared for you (Psalm 16:11).

Each of the headers in bold are lines from William Cowper’s beloved hymn, “God Moves In a Mysterious Way.” Acting the Miracle: God’s Work and Ours in the Mystery of Sanctification, edited by John Piper and David Mathis, with contributions from Kevin DeYoung, Ed Welch, Jarvis Williams, and Russell Moore, is now available in softcover and a free PDF.

Recent posts from Jon Bloom:

• Hope for the Battle with Intractable Weakness

• Six Benefits of Ordinary Daily Devotions

• Lay Aside the Weight of Prideful Preoccuptation

Love is at the heart of the Bible.

God loved us so much he sent his only be-loved Son to love us by blood, so that we would likewise love and treasure this be-loved Son (John 3:16, Revelation 1:5).

But that doesn’t tell the full story. On the cross, Christ initiated a love to break our love-less sin, to gift us with new hearts, and to make us love-givers (1 John 4:19). The Holy Spirit pours God’s love into us (Romans 5:5; Galatians 5:22).

Such love has a full-bodied Trinitarian flavor, with ancient roots dug deep in the Old Testament. And one scholar building on this theme is Jason DeRouchie, Associate Professor of Old Testament at Bethlehem College and Seminary in Minneapolis.

DeRouchie is the editor of an innovative new book: What the Old Testament Authors Really Cared About: A Survey of Jesus’ Bible, a full-color, illustrated survey of the Old Testament storyline from a distinctly Christ-centered and Christian perspective (Luke 24:44).

Heart-Soul-Might Love

DeRouchie penned the notes on Deuteronomy, a book he is well versed in, and I recently asked him for a mini biblical theology of love beginning with Deuteronomy and the famous Shema, which reads: “Hear, O Israel: The Lᴏʀᴅ our God, the Lᴏʀᴅ is one. You shall love the Lᴏʀᴅ your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:4–5).

All love begins with God, DeRouchie told me, “Because in his call for us to love him, that is where we know greatest joy for eternity. God loves us by calling us to love him.” And it’s a call to an all-embracing love, to love him with our heart and soul — our desires, our will, and all our motivations.

“But bigger than that,” DeRouchie said, “it’s a love that includes all our actions, our words, how we treat others, our perception, everything connected with our being.” Our love for God is all-encompassing; it includes loving God with all our might (literally, all our ‘very-ness’), which includes all our powers, wealth, resources, everything: “our car, our wife, our social media, our clothing, our children, our house. Love for God is wholehearted, life-encompassing, and community-embracing. Everywhere we go, everything we do cries out: ‘The Lᴏʀᴅ is one in my life!’”

Heart Replacement

But such a love expressed from our lips and hearts and wallets and smartphones requires a radical heart transformation. This has always been true (Deuteronomy 10:16). To love God and to love our neighbors, like the Law commanded, requires new hearts. In the Old Testament, this is the promise of the coming New Covenant (Ezekiel 11:19–20, 36:26).

The gospel is essential for every eternal love. “All my love is a blood-bought love,” DeRouchie said. “My joy in Christ, my delight in all that God has secured for me, is now what defines me. I am in this world to magnify the greatness of God shown to me in love. And every decision I make, every encounter I have, is about loving God, which overflows in love of neighbor. The fuel for loving my neighbor in a self-sacrificial way, regardless of the cost, is my joy and satisfaction in God.”

More on the Line

But this is only a start. For more on how love develops in the storyline of the Bible, listen to our full 39-minute conversation. There we address some practical Christ-centered ways love gets refreshed in our lives, lessons drawn from 1 Timothy 1:5.

Catch our full conversation by subscribing to the Authors on the Line podcast in iTunes here, or download the mp3 here (26.9 MB), or listen in from the resource page through the following link:

A Biblical Theology of Love: An Interview with Jason DeRouchie (39 Minutes)

A sampling of previous Authors on the Line podcasts —

• From Radical Lesbian to Redeemed Christian: An Autobiographical Interview with Rosaria Champagne Butterfield
• Life in God’s Cosmic Theater: An Interview with Kevin Vanhoozer
• Porn, Pride, and Praise: An Interview with Heath Lambert
• Manhood Restored: An Interview with Eric Mason
• The Bible as One Story: An Interview with Tom Schreiner

“He heard music and dancing.”

This line introduces the first main action of the “older brother” in Jesus’s parable of the Prodigal Son. The rest of the story culminates with what he doesn’t do.

Once There Was a Party

On his way home from the field, the older brother heard the commotion. “Music and dancing,” we’re told. And we’d expect, if there’s music and dancing, there’s laughter and cheers. This is a party. The father had ordered a celebration: “Let us eat and celebrate” (Luke 15:23). Which is what happened: “And they began to celebrate” (Luke 15:24).

It doesn’t take us readers long to see that this is a big deal. The word for “celebration” is used four times in this parable, and it means merriment! It was the kind of rejoicing that if found in other contexts for different motives it would be wrong, which is the case when this word is used two other times in Luke’s Gospel (Luke 12:19; 16:19).

But the older brother wants no part in this party. He got mad when he found out the news behind this noise. Literally, “he did not desire to enter” (Luke 15:28). He refused to join the joy. So his father came out to him and entreated him. The father pleaded, implored, urged his eldest son to share in his pleasure. But the eldest son still refused. He complained, twisting what the father had graciously done for his brother to be about what he had not done for him. He recoiled at the display of mercy and no doubt exposed several signs of corruption deep inside. But his father’s response simply called out the obvious . . .

The older brother’s problem was that he was not glad when he should have been.

“It was fitting,” the father says, “It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found” (Luke 15:32).

The Right Time to Rejoice

In the full picture of Luke’s Gospel this parable stands as an indictment against the unbelieving Jewish leaders. Jesus had launched a new day in redemptive history. The unfolding drama of God’s salvation was extending beyond the borders of ethnic Israel — even to “the highways and hedges” (Luke 14:23). The wayward sons and daughters from afar were being gathered. This was a promised day, a long-awaited day in the history of Israel and the world. This was the day of salvation — a day to celebrate which continues to the present (2 Corinthians 6:2). But the Jewish leaders in the midst of this day were not glad, and they were wrong. And if we are not glad now, the same goes for us.

God commands us to be joyful: “Delight yourself in the Lᴏʀᴅ” (Psalm 37:4); Rejoice in the Lord always (Philippians 4:4). The basis of this joy is God himself. He displays his manifold perfections and satisfies our deepest desire. “Come, everyone who thirsts!” he tells us (Isaiah 55:1). This alone is enough to necessitate our joy.

Now add to this the mighty works of God occurring at this particular epoch of human history. The Holy Spirit is on the move. The gospel is advancing to all nations. Jesus is building his church. It is fitting that we celebrate and be glad. And therefore, in a real sense, to the degree that we refuse to celebrate and be glad, we show ourselves to be out of touch with God’s triumph in this world. And if we are indifferent, if we prefer to huff and puff, we must be as clueless as the Pharisees.

The Real Rejoicing

To be clear, there is nothing shallow about this joy. The event that inspires this pleasure goes deeper than the superficial successes that tend to snag us. The point is not to celebrate and be glad because a reality TV show about Christians is topping the charts. Rather, this joy is a kind not of this world. It’s more like: our brothers and sisters in the Middle East are being killed, our buildings are being burned, our children are threatened, our witness marginalized, but the gates of hell will not prevail. Sinners are being saved.

The good news of Jesus, simultaneous to our sufferings, and often through them, is penetrating the darkest darkness all over this world. There is no depth his love cannot reach and no power that can stay his hand. Jesus is building his church. Whatever circumstances we find ourselves in, this is cause to rejoice.

The time is right. It is fitting to celebrate and be glad.

Recent posts from Jonathan Parnell:

• Pizza! Pizza! Waking Up in Little Caesar’s

• Don’t Go to Church to Give

• Is Anyone Sad for Ariel Castro?

Undistracting attractiveness is John Piper’s term for it.

It’s a vision for the Christian to steer a middle course between idolizing our bodies and neglecting them. It includes giving our bodies enough attention — with sleep, diet, exercise, and upkeep — to avoid being distractingly unattractive, and reining in our impulses to pursue a self-focused attractiveness that distracts.

Deeper Than Dieting, Botox, and Plastic Surgery

Your body is a precious gift from God. And the Bible is clear about its highest purpose: To make God look good.

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. (1 Corinthians 6:19–20)

And so Paul writes, “It is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death” (Philippians 1:20).

Beneath the flashpoints of dieting and exercise, botox and plastic surgery, lies this question for the Christian: Are we using our bodies in such a way that God is seen to be more precious than our bodies?

“People can tell if you’re focused more on the inner person of beauty than the outer person of beauty,” says Piper. He points to 1 Peter 3:3–4, which was written for women, but also is applicable to men:

Do not let your adorning be external — the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear — but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious.

Caring for “Brother Ass”

C.S. Lewis called the body “Brother Ass.” It’s serviceable, and not too impressive, and we should be thankful when it does its job and gets us where we need to go. Like a loyal donkey.

And the best of bodies in this age will soon find their beauty frustratingly illusive. Says Piper, “The most voluptuous female body you have ever seen in your life is going to be ashen faced in a coffin before she knows it — and then where will be all the investments in that temporary, outward beauty?”

Today’s episode of Ask Pastor John also includes advice for singles who are especially eager to be fit and attractive to get attention from the opposite sex, as well as more on “present[ing] your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” (Romans 12:1).

Ask Pastor John now has surpassed 2 million plays since its inception earlier this year. Thank you, to all who have listened and submitted questions. Here are the three most played episodes released in the past month:

Tuning In

Ask Pastor John is a daily podcast series of 3–8 minute conversations released each weekday at 10:30am (EST) through the DG Facebook and Twitter feeds. You can tune in to the new episodes through the free Ask Pastor John mobile app for iPhone and Android. We’re currently hosting all the recordings on SoundCloud, a website making it easy to listen to several of the podcasts in one sitting. They’re also archived on the DG website and syndicated in iTunes.

We want to hear from you. To submit a question to Pastor John please include your first name, hometown, and question in an email to AskPastorJohn AT desiringGod DOT org.

On the extent of who will be saved, the Bible makes two clear points:

1. God desires that all sinners be saved (1 Timothy 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9; Ezekiel 18:23; Matthew 23:37).
2. God chose some people from eternity past (the elect), to be saved unconditionally, and only those elect will genuinely respond to the gospel and be saved (Matthew 22:14; John 6:37, 44, 65; 8:47; 10:26–29; Romans 8:29–30; 9:6–23; 11:5–10; 1 Corinthians 1:26–30; Ephesians 1:4–5; 1 Thessalonians 1:4; 2 Thessalonians 2:13; James 2:5).

But how these two biblical truths (that seem to contradict) actually relate, has perplexed theologians and inquiring Christian minds for many centuries, sparking vigorous debates and (more recently) fiery comment threads on Facebook.

This pair of doctrines force questions like:

• Can God genuinely will that all be saved (1), and yet only choose to save only some, the elect (2)?
• Is it even logical to hold that God can at the same time will salvation for all (1), and not will salvation for all (2)?
• If (1) and (2) are true, is God schizophrenic or confused? (1 Corinthians 14:33)
• Or can a sovereign, all-powerful God who does whatever he pleases, hold wishful desires for the salvation of all that he cannot fulfill?
• Which leads to asking, is there a power in the universe greater than God, frustrating his desires?
• Or can God will in different ways simultaneously?
• Or should modern Christians simply downplay election in order to highlight God’s desire for the salvation of all?
• Because if we equally hold to election, isn’t our general offer of the gospel to all sinners disingenuous?
• And won’t election erode the energy and incentive for global missions and evangelism that we derive from God’s desire for all to be saved?
• And how does the ultimate aim of God’s own glory factor into this discussion?

These are just a few of the thick questions involved.

Finding the answers is like climbing Mount Everest. Not everyone is up for the climb, but we believe it can be done, and there are guides to help if you want to make the attempt. John Piper offers himself as a Sherpa of sorts for the steep climb in his new little book, Does God Desire All to Be Saved?

If you’re asking these types of questions — and if you’re up for the climb — the 50-page book is available as a free download here, or purchase here.

Sometimes we think the way to engage people in mission is to make sure we get the right information to them.

• If we just preach the Bible, people will evangelize.

• If we show people the commands in Scripture to care for the poor, people will develop a heart for mercy ministry.

• If we make people aware of our need for more volunteers, people will sign up.

In other words, we perceive a knowledge problem. People need to know how to apply the Scriptures better, and once they know what they need to do, they’ll do it.

Not So Fast

But this isn’t the way long-term change takes place. Most of the time, when we are marked by missional apathy, it’s not that we don’t know what we ought to be doing; it’s that we don’t want to be doing what we ought to be doing.

In our efforts to increase missional fervor, we can get so focused on giving people more information, or better application, that we forget that our main task is to lead people to exultation. That’s a fancy word for “worship.” We exult, we delight in the Savior, we revel in him. Exaltation of the Savior leads to exultation of the saints.

Lack of mission is rarely a knowledge problem; it’s a worship problem. We don’t have any trouble talking about the things we love most. Whenever we find something worthy of attention, we talk about it.

The same is true of our relationship with Christ. The more we are in awe of his worthiness, the more likely we are to speak of him to others and serve others in his name.

Weighty Truths and Heartfelt Worship

Sometimes people worry that the rough edges of Christianity will lead us to avoid serving our neighbor and sharing the gospel. So we play down some of the harder truths of the gospel, not denying them of course, but not giving them their proper weight.

The reality of hell is an example. There are all sorts of ways to downplay the truth of one’s eternal destiny; the most common is simply to not speak of it, or to recast salvation as dealing more with this life than the next.

But what happens when the reality of hell is no longer grounding our talk about salvation and the gospel? We miss out on a moment of worship.

What Makes Us Marvel More

Consider this scenario. You’re walking with a friend, not paying much attention to where you are headed. Suddenly, your friend grabs your arm and yanks you backwards. At first, you are annoyed that you’ve been stopped so suddenly. But then your friend points in front of you. Sure enough, he had a reason. You were about to step off into a ditch, where you might have broken your foot or sprained your ankle. Your annoyance turns to gratitude for his “saving you” from possible harm. You thank your friend and move on.

Consider the same scenario, except this time your friend doesn’t pull you back from a ditch, but a cliff. You were about to fall to your death, hundreds of feet below. What would your reaction be in this situation? Not just a word of “thanks.” You’d be crying and hugging your friend, overflowing with gratitude for the way he just saved your life.

In the same way, when we minimize the severity of God’s judgment for sin, we are less inclined to stand in awe of the marvelous salvation Christ has provided for us. We think we’re pushing aside an obstacle when we neglect the reality of judgment. But what we’re actually doing is pushing away one of the truths that most leads us to worship. The reality of God’s grace is all the more amazing the more we see our sin and what it deserves.

Feel the Truth

A gospel-centered teacher isn’t satisfied to see his people learn truths about God. A gospel-centered leader wants them to feel those truths. To feel the full weight of God’s provision for us in Christ. To have the heart’s affections stirred to worship the loving God who has saved us by his grace and incorporated us into his family.

For many years my conviction has been that Christian unity and Christian truth are served best not by removing fences, but by loving across them and having welcoming gates. I don’t claim to do it well. I want to do it better.

The point is that minimizing truth, or filing down its clear edges, or blending it all into one indistinguishable mass, or focusing on prayer, service, and mission, rather than truth — none of these produces unity that honors truth, creates robust communities, or endures for generations.

That happens best when we live well in our communities of conviction, and love well across convictional lines.

Would Lewis Agree?

Would C.S. Lewis agree with this? Didn’t he write Mere Christianity? Doesn’t that imply we should lay aside our denominational differences and live in the visible unity of “mere Christianity?”

You may be surprised by what Lewis means by this phrase. But he tells us clearly. What follows is an excerpt (in italics) from the introduction to Mere Christianity (1943, xi–xii) broken into sections with my comments.

Not an Alternative to Creeds

I hope no reader will suppose that “mere” Christianity is here put forward as an alternative to the creeds of the existing communions — as if a man could adopt it in preference to Congregationalism or Greek Orthodoxy or anything else.

When Lewis writes about mere Christianity he is not criticizing Christian denominations. In fact, he says it’s not as though a person even “could” make mere Christianity a standing place. It would be like saying that the shirt I wear is neither sleeveless, short-sleeved, or long-sleeved. It’s just a shirt.

The Hall of the House

[Mere Christianity] is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals.

Lewis loved the Church of England. It was his denominational home. But he did not see his calling as an advocate for Anglicanism. His calling was to lead people into the hall of the house of Christianity. And he knew that the hall was not the place anyone should live.

This is the mistake many have made about Lewis. He was not ecumenical in the sense of leading people out of denominational rooms into the hall of unity. His ecumenical spirit will be seen below as love between rooms, not the emptying of rooms into the hall.

The denominational rooms are where the fire and chairs and meals are. In other words, if you try to live in the hall, you will go without warmth and rest and food. Mere Christianity is not lived Christianity. Trying to make it a life is like trying to eat mere food but never eating any particular vegetables or fruits or meats.

Don’t Stay in the Hall

The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in. For that purpose the worst of the rooms (whichever that may be) is, I think, preferable.

He is so clear about the inadequacy of mere Christianity that he says that living the best you can in the worst Christian denomination is better than trying to live in the hall.

Enter a Room

It is true that some people may have to wait in the hall for a considerable time. . . . You must keep on praying for light: and, of course, even in the hall you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. And above all you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and paneling. In plain language, the question should never be: “Do I like that kind of service?” but “Are these doctrines true: Is holiness here? Does my conscience move me towards this?”

This is one of the reasons I love Lewis. There is no gibberish here about all the rooms being equal. Or all the rooms having the same truth from different angles. Or personal experience being the main thing, while truth-claims are a human presumption. Or the inadequacy of saints to make good judgments about which denomination has truth. None of that.

No. Instead there is the straightforward statement that a crucial move must be made from the hall of mere Christianity to the doctrinal specificity of a room. To that end your primary task, once you are in the hall, is to discover the room closest to the truth. So he urges us to “keep on praying for light.” And to “ask which door is the true one.” And to inquire not whether we like the services but “Are these doctrines true?”

What the World Needs

When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors, and to those who are still in the hall. If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.

This is Lewis’s ecumenism. Choose a denominational room according to biblical truth as best you can. Then love those who choose differently, even if they turn out to be enemies.

What the world needs from the great house of Christianity is not that all the walls be knocked out between the rooms, but that we love each other in all the ways the Bible says, including defending and confirming the truth of Scripture as we see it (Ephesians 4:15).

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Recent posts from John Piper:

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